Freelance Project Pricing Calculator

Estimate the work in pieces rather than as one number, add the hours nobody puts in a task list — meetings, feedback loops, revisions — then multiply by the hourly rate that actually covers your income, expenses and tax. Finally, gross the total up for platform and payment fees so the amount that lands in your account is the amount you needed. The output is a price you can defend line by line, which is also the price a client is least likely to argue with.

Instead of one number per task you give three: the best case, the likely case and the worst case. The expected duration is (best + 4 × likely + worst) ÷ 6, which weights the likely case four times as heavily as the extremes, and the spread (worst − best) ÷ 6 is treated as a standard deviation. It comes from project management (PERT, built for the Polaris programme in the 1950s) and it works for freelance quoting because it forces you to write down the worst case instead of quietly assuming it will not happen.

Because "expected" means half of projects run longer. If you price the expected hours, you lose money on roughly every second project of that shape, and the ones that go well only pay you your floor rate — you carry all the risk and get none of the upside. Pricing at 90% confidence means only about one project in ten runs past what you charged for. The difference between the two numbers is the premium you are charging for accepting a fixed price at all; if the client does not want to pay it, offer to bill hourly instead and let them carry the risk.

Fixed price wins when the scope is genuinely clear and you are faster than average at that kind of work — you keep the efficiency gain instead of billing fewer hours for it. Hourly wins when the scope is vague, the client is unresponsive, or discovery is part of the job, because those are the conditions that make estimates wrong. A useful middle ground is a fixed price for a tightly-defined phase one plus an hourly change-order rate written into the contract for anything outside it.

Budget for two rounds of changes on anything creative or client-facing, which lands around 15-25% of build hours, and cap the number of rounds in the contract — the buffer protects you from normal feedback, not from unlimited feedback. Admin and meetings are separate and usually add another 10-20%: kick-off calls, status updates, chasing assets and invoicing are all hours spent on this project that never appear in a task list.

Yes, and it is a division, not an addition. Upwork takes 10%, so to keep 100 you must charge 100 ÷ 0.90 = 111.11, not 110. Adding the percentage instead of grossing up leaves you short by the fee on the fee, and the gap widens on Fiverr-style 20% cuts. This calculator does the division for you and shows the fee amount separately so you can see exactly what the platform costs you on this project.

It is free and there is no signup. Every calculation runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent to a server, logged or stored, and nothing is saved when you close the tab. Take a screenshot or copy the figures into your proposal before you leave.