For my 5+ years of consulting and web freelancing I’ve met a lot of people, some good, some bad. But there was always one thing I kept on stumbling upon – cost of my services and customers asking for discount.
Basically, if a customer asks for discount – be prepared that if you give it, you will end up doing more for less.
Once people get a discount from you, they think that you are quite “flexible” – flexible to give em a discount, flexible to add more to the site for the same money, flexible to spend more time doing this ridiculous visual effect they saw somewhere else, and so on and on.
In every job I ever took, there was this element of a “little more” – something else not covered by agreement or contract. You can do it once as a favor, but not when a project contains a few of those… This is where your time comes in. And time is money.
So I decided, that every time I get into a situation where someone asks for discount – I immediately tell them, that the price have changed and it’s double of what it was now. This eliminates cheapskates, looking to do A LOT for A LITTLE, and other creative crowds – like those “artists of New York City”, or Jewish Yellow Pages clients….
My good friend Eugene Morozov once said: “There is a very little number of smart [IT] people out there…”, and was absolutely right. So don’t undersell yourself, if you know what you are doing.