web design pricing advice

Hi! I recently started working as a freelance web designer/developer but I am really not sure how to price my service correctly and am not confident in giving clients price quotes I am comfortable working with.

I got this client who I am designing a wordpress site for. But he wants to work in milestones which I personally feel like they slow me down and I'd rather if it would be a single payment split to 50% at the beginning and 50% at the end. I am halfway done and only need to convert my design to wordpress, check everything works as intended and upload everything to his server but he priced the latest milestone for coding the site as $250 (-10% for freelance site) this is one of the biggest parts of a website design and there is still $625 of the agreed upon quote left. I am not sure how to tell him that it's too low I don't want to sound greedy and scare him away.

what do you suggest? please replay quickly as I need to return to him with an answer.

Thank you!

 

Just tell the client what you just told us. Don't try to sound rude or demanding. Just let him know in your next email: "it's my practice to have at least 50% of the fee paid before I can continue finishing the project."

 

I would suggest you go with the client. Milestone payment is the best way to work on fixed price jobs in freelancer websites, it ensures a bit security for both freelancer and the client. May be your client is not able to pay 50% in advance and it is big payment for him to release initially. What I can suggest is if you alter your milestone payment according to you and go with it. This is the best way to ensure secure payment both ways.

 

It is generally bad form to go back to a client once the terms have been agreed and the work has begun. You can ask him to change terms, mid-project, but he would be silly to do so. I suppose that if you admit to being a bit of a newbie at this, he might do something out of sympathy, but it is a bit of a longshot. The key is to make sure that you are happy with the terms of any deal before agreeing to proceed as you move forward with more projects.

 

Thank you all for your suggestions! I decided to move on and put trust in the client for now. I'll use it as a learning experience for future projects.

 

How did the project go?