Hourly vs Fixed-Price Web Design: Which Protects Your Budget?

With hourly web design, you pay for time and carry the risk that the work takes longer than estimated. With fixed-price web design, you pay for a defined result and the designer carries that risk. The difference is who pays when the project runs slow.

Disclosure: I sell fixed-price websites, so I have a stake in this topic. The only prices quoted below are my own, which are published on my pricing page. I have left out market averages because most of the ones in circulation have no source.

How do the two models compare?

	Hourly	Fixed price
What you buy	Time	A defined result
Final cost known	When the last invoice arrives	Before work starts
Who pays for a slow build	You	The designer
Changes of mind	Easy, and billed	Quoted as a fixed add-on first
What it needs to work	Trust in the timesheet	A clear written scope
Best for	Open-ended or exploratory work	A site whose pages you can list

What is wrong with hourly billing for a website?

Nothing dishonest. The problem is structural. An hourly designer who works faster earns less, and one who works slower earns more. Most are honest about their hours, and the incentive still points the wrong way.

The second problem is that an estimate is not a price. "About thirty hours" is a guess made before the work is understood, and the client is the one who pays when the guess is wrong. You find out what the site cost on the day of the final invoice.

I wrote more about this on why I never bill hourly.

When is hourly the right choice?

Hourly is the fair model when nobody can define the work in advance:

• Ongoing small changes to a site that already exists.
• Debugging a problem whose cause is unknown.
• Exploratory design, where the goal is to find out what to build.

In those cases a fixed price would be a guess with a margin added for safety, and you would pay for the margin.

What does a fixed price need in order to hold?

A fixed price is only as good as its edges. Four things have to be written down:

1. The scope. The pages and the features, as a list.
2. The revision rounds. How many, and when.
3. The exclusions. What is not in the price, stated plainly.
4. The rule for extras. Anything outside the scope is quoted as a fixed add-on and approved before it is built.

With those four in place, a fixed price is the lower-risk option for a client. Without them, it is a different kind of argument.

How do you tell a real fixed price from a disguised estimate?

Ask one question: "If this takes you twice as long as you planned, what do I pay?" If the answer is anything other than "the same", the price is an estimate.

For how fixed pricing compares with hiring an agency or managing a freelancer on a larger build, see agency, freelancer or fixed-price sprint.

The fixed-price option

My Launch Site is a custom-designed website of up to five pages, built in Framer and live on your domain in 14 days, for a fixed $1,500. The scope, the exclusions and the day-by-day schedule are all on the fixed-price website page. If it fits, book a free scope call and you will have the price in writing before you commit to anything.