Why “Charge Your Worth” is Bad Pricing Advice
If you’ve been freelancing for a while, you’ve probably heard this one:
“You just need to charge what you’re worth.”
It sounds empowering. It makes you feel like you’re standing up for yourself.
But here’s the thing. It keeps you focused on you — your confidence, your insecurities, your self-esteem — instead of the real drivers of price.
If you want to get off the client roller coaster and build a business around assets that don’t depend on your time, you need a different way of looking at pricing.
Here’s what I teach the freelancers I work with 👇🏽
1. Pricing isn’t about you
“Charge your worth” turns pricing into a self-esteem exercise.
Clients aren’t buying you. They’re buying an outcome.
Your worth as a human being is infinite. The market value of your work? That’s entirely about the impact it creates for them.
When you see that clearly, pricing stops being about whether you “feel confident” and starts being about what the result is worth in their world. That’s a much more stable foundation to build on.
2. The ceiling on your price isn’t your skill — it’s the size of the budgets you’re around
If you only talk to people whose max spend is $2K, that’s all you’ll ever get offered — no matter how good you are.
High-value projects live in different rooms. The people in those rooms have different priorities, different timelines, and a different idea of what “reasonable” looks like.
I’ve seen freelancers go from $2K projects to $20K projects without changing their skillset — they just started showing up where $20K was the norm.
That’s the real “glass ceiling” in pricing, and it has nothing to do with your talent.
3. High-Budget Clients Aren’t Buying Your Time — They’re Buying Certainty
When you’re in the $10K–$50K project range, the client isn’t asking, “How many hours will this take you?”
That’s a small-budget question.
Big-budget clients are asking:
“Will this solve the problem?”
“Will this help us hit our goal?”
“Can you deliver without making it harder for us?”
They’re buying certainty — certainty that you understand the stakes, that you’ve thought through the risks, and that you can make the project happen without creating more problems than you solve.
Once they feel that from you, the hourly math disappears. If you keep pulling them back into an “hours × rate” conversation, you don’t raise their confidence — you lower it.
4. You’re not just the person doing the work — you’re a lever
When you price like a freelancer, you’re selling labor.
When you price like a business owner, you’re selling impact.
If your work helps a client generate $250K, charging $25K isn’t “expensive” — it’s a bargain.
I’ve talked to people who delivered projects in the $20K–$60K range that took the same effort as a $2K job. The difference wasn’t the workload — it was the scale of the result.
5. Bigger projects aren’t harder — they just require more trust
The leap from a $2.5K project to a $25K project is almost never about technical complexity. It’s about trust.
High-budget clients need to know:
You can handle the scope.
You’ll keep the project on track.
You won’t create new problems in the process.
That trust comes from how you show up, the process you lead them through, and the proof you can give that you’ve handled similar stakes before — or that you’ve thought far enough ahead to de-risk the project.
The real shift
When you stop trying to “charge your worth” and start charging based on value:
You stop negotiating against yourself.
You start having better conversations with better clients.
You start building a business that isn’t chained to your hours.
That’s how you get off the client roller coaster for good.
Want to see what those bigger projects actually look like?
Every week I curate a list of $10K+ web design and creative projects so you can see the kinds of opportunities where value-based pricing isn’t just possible — it’s expected.
It’s called the $10K Project List.
When you start seeing these every week, you stop wondering if bigger budgets exist — you start figuring out which ones you want.
This was originally posted on the Freelance to Freedom newsletter by Omari Harebin.
