What I charge, and why

I get DMs every week asking what I charge. The honest answer is "it depends," but that's not useful, so here's the actual breakdown — three tiers, real numbers, and the reasoning underneath each one.

For context: I'm 18, solo, based in Belgium, full-stack dev. Mostly Next.js / Supabase / mobile / AI. Available 25-30 hours a week of focused build time per project.

Tier 1: Landing pages — €1,500 fixed

A beautiful single-page site that converts. Built in 3-5 days.

What's included:

• Custom design (not a Figma template)
• Mobile-perfect responsive
• Form + email integration (Resend or whatever)
• SEO basics (meta tags, JSON-LD, sitemap)
• Deployed to your domain
• 1 round of revisions after delivery

Why €1,500 and not €500:

• A €500 landing page is a Wix template + a logo. That's a side-hustle product, not a service.
• A €1,500 page is a custom design that closes deals. Clients tell me their pre-launch waitlist 5x'd after I shipped vs. their old Carrd page. That's the value pricing comes from — not the hours.
• I built nine of these last year. The ones priced under €1k attracted clients who'd argue about every pixel; the ones priced at €1.5k+ got clients who said "looks great, ship it."

Why fixed and not hourly:

• Hourly punishes me for being fast. I'd build the same thing in 2 days as someone billing 80 hours, and earn ⅕ as much. Fixed prices the outcome.

Tier 2: MVP builds — €6,500 fixed

The flagship offer. Real working product in 7 days. Auth, database, payments, deploy.

What's included:

• Full-stack web app (Next.js + Supabase) or mobile app (Expo)
• Authentication + role-based access
• Database modeling and migrations
• Payments wired (Stripe or Polar)
• Daily progress updates with a live preview URL
• 2 weeks of post-launch fixes

Why €6,500 specifically:

• The math: 7 days of focused work × ~6 hours/day = 42 hours. At €150/hr that's €6,300. €6,500 rounds it cleanly and gives me a small margin for the inevitable scope creep.
• It's also psychologically the boundary between "agency-ish budget" and "hire a freelancer." Below €5K, clients want a Fiverr gig. Above €10K, they want a meeting and a contract. €6,500 lands in the sweet spot where they can decide on a Loom call.

What I learned by raising prices:

• I started this offer at €2,500. Got a lot of clients. Clients were great but I was working 14-hour days and missing rent.
• I raised to €4,500. Same volume of inquiries, slightly more selective clients.
• I raised to €6,500. Inquiries dropped 20%, but the clients who came through were significantly easier to work with. They knew what they wanted. They paid quickly. They didn't try to scope-creep.
• The lesson: price is a filter, not a tax. Higher prices select for clients who value finishing the project over saving €2K.

Tier 3: Custom / SaaS — From €12,000

Multi-tenant SaaS, AI products, anything serious. Scoped together.

This one is not fixed-price by default. Here's the reasoning:

For genuinely complex projects, fixed-price hurts both sides.

If I scope-up to be safe (€15K, no surprises), the client pays a premium to absorb risk that might never materialize. If I scope-down to be competitive (€10K, plus change orders), I either eat the overrun or I'm constantly emailing about scope. Both feel bad.

So for Tier 3:

• We do a paid discovery sprint — €1,500-2,500, 1 week, ending in a fully-spec'd build with a fixed price OR a clear time-and-materials estimate.
• Most clients pick the fixed price. I'm usually 15-20% more accurate after a discovery sprint than from a pitch call.
• For ongoing work, I do monthly retainers — €2,000-2,500/month for ~25 hours, with rollover.

What I don't do

• I don't bid against agencies on RFPs. They're built to dilute commitment and pad scope. Solo devs can't win that game and shouldn't try.
• I don't take equity in lieu of payment. I will consider "cash + small equity" for founder-clients I genuinely believe in, but never "all equity." That's not a job, that's a co-founder, and being a co-founder means I should be picking the project, not just executing it.
• I don't do hourly retainers under 20 hours/month. Below that, the context-switching tax eats the relationship and the work suffers.

How clients actually pay

Fiverr for projects under €5K. Buyer protection makes the first transaction painless on both sides. Their fee is 20% but for first-time clients it's worth it — they trust the platform faster than they trust me.

Direct invoice for €5K+. 50% upfront, 50% on delivery. Wise for international transfers, Stripe for cards, IBAN for EU. Crypto if asked.

Milestone-based for Tier 3. Quartered. Discovery → midpoint demo → beta → launch.

How I handle the negotiation

Almost every client opens with "is there flexibility on the price?"

My answer is always the same: yes, on scope. Not on price.

If the budget is €4,000 instead of €6,500, the answer is "let's cut the auth and the admin panel — you can ship without them — and we'll do those in a v2." If the budget is €1,000, the answer is "you're not ready for this offer; here's a Tally template that will get you 70% of the way there for free."

Refusing to discount but cheerfully reshaping scope earns more respect than people expect. It signals that the price reflects the work, and the work is what matters. Clients who push past that signal are not the clients you want.

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This is what works for me at this stage of my career — solo, no overhead, in a low-cost-of-living city, with a portfolio that lets me say no to projects I don't want. Your numbers will be different. The reasoning, I think, generalizes:

Price the outcome, not the hours. Use price as a filter for the right clients. Be flexible on scope, not on number. And when in doubt, charge a little more — your worst clients will get filtered first.