Ask HN: How to feel ok charging people?

Unless you’re just don’t need to concern yourself with the elemental aspects of survival, this is a dangerous mindset for you to be in.

When you’re billing regularly and you do a little extra above and beyond the billing that’s on you. However, it degrades the relationship from business to “some helpful pal” to not respect the dynamic of value.

Here’s a cross post I wrote from a prior response on “how do you bill?” Maybe seeing things as more methodical and commoditized will help you…

Learn the art of invoice.

I create an invoice immediately.

Start invoicing after the first conversation where you agree you will be doing the work.

Invoice immediately.

Micro invoice if you have to.

Invoice in minimum four hour blocks just for talking.

Invoice in ten+ hour blocks like a retainer for mom and pop shops so you can inch forward.

Invoice requesting portions up front (just to begin!) on invoices worth over 10k.

Bill reguglarly.

Invoice up front for the TOTAL amount, and then send the same (modified) invoice periodically (once a week, once every two weeks, every 30 days, or on incremental delivery. What ever works best!) for regular payments on completion of milestones.

And did I mention KEEP INVOICING! Don’t have feelings. The contract part is you will DO THE WORK and they PAY YOU.

You may think I’m being silly. Too many fine technical folks are ignorant and afraid of MONEY.

Bill for everything productive (talking, email, meetings). In fact, a good rule of thumb is to add 25% to your estimated project costs for TALKING and other administrative tasks (as low as 15 minute increments if necessary.)

Good luck! And remember, INVOICE!

Oh, I definitely need to concern myself with the elemental aspects of survival!

I get and respect your comment. I can see that it is good advice. But it’s a bit like a good primer on how to approach methodically writing a book, when a writer says they have writer’s block.

The problem is the block. But, I suppose, sometimes the right advice is ‘just sit down and type something, and the rest will follow’?

I think this is a natural thing. We're wired to want to be in communities, and contribute to a communal pool, while taking as little as possible from it. There's probably an evolutionary reason for that, but it gets exploited by society. What we're doing now (trading labor for money) isn't natural, but it's how it is.

I remember a business seminar where a guy said he repairs sofas but had trouble treating it as a business. So the speaker asked him, what happens when they don't repair the sofas? They throw it away and buy a new one. How many people know that sofas could be repaired? Not very many. And so if he didn't advertise his services and didn't charge, people would be wasting their money throwing away perfectly good sofas.

Most work we do is like that - if you didn't do the work and charge for it, the alternative is much worse. Before I joined my past few projects, the codebase was a complete mess, rigid, unable to add new features. One of my clients said that if he knew I was on the market, he'd have paid obscene rates to hire one person like me, instead of some overpriced overseas team that got nothing done.

What works for me is finding clients who insist I take the damn money. One client insisted on paying 8 hours for a 2 hour in-person meeting, something about the rest of the day not being productive for me. Be generous. Some will exploit that. Don't work for them. Some will be even more generous in response. Work for those people.

I suggest reading a mini-book called "Breaking the Time Barrier", which is about how to transition from full-time to consulting. Several chapters talk about the mindset shift needed to value your time appropriately, once you move into hourly billing.

https://www.freshbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/breaking-the-t...

Think of it this way: Charging them money helps them too.

Imagine you buy a course for $200 vs $0.

If you pay $0 you may not finish it, or value it. You might resent the time going into it etc.

If you pay $200 you are motivated and will finish it and learn it.

If you do hours of work for $0, then you are too busy to engage further, they are now stuck having to pay someone else. And they hadn't budgeted for that.

If you charge, they already have a plan in mind, a budget they can switch to someone else later if needed - if you no longer want to work on it or need a break.

You say that getting paid isn't interesting to you but your goal is to make money without being salaried. Consider that you won't be able to achieve your goal or help people in the way you want if you don't charge them money.

Do you _have to be_ interested in charging money/getting paid in order to do the actions required?

Where is the greatest point of friction? Is the issue that you're not interested in having sales conversations? Is it not being interested in the tedious aspects of running a business? Is it because receiving compensation makes it less fun for you?

What does it look like for you to be interested in something? Can you think of something else in your life that you do regularly but that you aren't interested in? How do you make that work?

Exploring these questions deeply may help you find clarity on what the exact issue is. I'd recommend making a daily habit of journaling with these questions. Pay attention to what other questions come up as you write and explore those too.

Presumably you want to get a certain amount of money out of this.

The lower bound should be enough to provide this. Bearing in mind that an hourly rate never translates into the salary you think it should. Probably half your hours are going to be billable hours.

The other way to look at it is that no one is being forced to use your services. You may think $1000/hr is crazy but if it's worth it for a business to pay for it, they will. If not, they won't.

Ultimately your rate is going to be somewhere between the minimum you need, and the maximum they will pay. I don't really have good answers beyond that. You could argue starting high, and lowering your charges is better because it's always easier to lower prices. On the other hand if you want to attract customers, lower prices are better.

Ultimately it comes down to the specifics of your local market and niche.

I've been in this situation before, setting my hourly rate too low. And I eventually ended walking away because it wasn't worth it for me.

For me it's really easy. I like to keep a roof over my head, feed my cat, and send my kids to school.

Also whoever is using my services is likely using them to make some money themselves. Why should I work for free if they aren't.

Think of it like this, as long as you are actually providing the value they expected then they wouldn’t be paying for it at all if it wasn’t helping them make a profit (or reach whatever goal they have). So by them continuing to pay and use the system you’re helping them out, and they know it can’t exist if you don’t get paid.

I think it’s really that simple. In fact the money being paid for the service is proving that you’re doing the right thing, not the opposite.

Money pays for the services needed to run the service and money helps create your desire to work on and better the product, which the customer wants.

I don't know how many times I've pleaded with a developer of a product I used to raise their prices, because I believed they charged too little, and I wanted them to charge more so that the product had better odds of surviving.

In your original posting, you say "helping is enough" but clearly it isn't. If it were really enough, you would have your needs met and would not need payment. So this is perhaps more like someone saying they don't have an appetite and don't want to eat. In the short term, you can follow such a feeling and fast without issues. But if you have a persistent lack of appetite, you eventually either force yourself to eat anyway or you become incapacitated. There is no more logic to it than this.

What is the basis of your reluctance to ask for payment? To have recognized the logical problem but still feel "blocked" as you said in another comment here, there must be some other emotional or subconscious context. Unfortunately, we can only make scattered probes into this hidden realm.

You have had regular salaried work and would consider going back to it. Would you do that but reject the paychecks? If not, why not? What's different other than the "batching" of the transactions? Do you have anxiety about asking and being rebuffed? Do you have embarrassment about exposing needs of your own? Do you have some magnanimous fantasy you can't let go of?

Without knowing you at all, I'd suggest reframing your question as how to find a happy and sustainable income for yourself. The goal is not to work. The goal is to support yourself, and work happens to be the way this is usually done. You know you need income to survive. If you did not need income, then you could focus all your time on hobbies or charity.

You know you have some preferences for your work scope. With a stable salaried position, you are in some sense coalescing your payment and work-scope negotiations into less frequent but larger commitment. In another sense, you are delegating the frequent transactional negotiations to your employer who obtains funds and work scope obligations somehow. And in a third sense, you are decoupling the financial and scope negotiations if it is a larger organization where you may enjoy some job stability even while you argue about work scope with your direct management. Does any aspect of this resonates more with you? Maybe you've abandoned something you actually find valuable.

The money doesn't interest me much in itself either, while getting things done and making the world a little better does. (Often that does require money, though!) Thus many of my friends have earned stacks more than I ever will because it is their focus.

I have spent almost my entire working life freelance, and find monthly income regardless of how much or little I have done to be almost annoying! I'm off payroll again from next month as it happens.

You can do make it work, but maybe think of invoicing as what will let you go on helping people the way that interests you?

If helping is the reward, then you could get a day job so you can work on helping when the workday is done. To put it another way, your passion is not different from dancing, or model trains, or disc golf. It's special because it is the street you live on, but that's the boundaries of it.

I mean there's nothing wrong with waiting tables enough hours to rent a mobile home, keep beer in the fridge, and the internet connected so you are free to pursue the problems that interest you.

Good luck.

If asking for money feels odd to you, then approach it logically. First of all; So why don't you simply not charge, if you don't care?

All we really have is our time. I like helping people too and in a different economic system, maybe that would be enough. We all need to eat.

You could consider hiring a bookkeeper type to work a few hours per week to do the paperwork, taxes and so on for you. Maybe being one step removed from the "asking people for money" bit would help?

I wondered where is this coming from.

In my case it was stemmed from my soviet socialism-communism background. So perverted slavish attitude towards money in general was deeply rooted in psychology of my family.

Realizing the roots of this helped me to overcome it and realize that every job must be paid. That money is the only measurable indicator of good.

So I would charge fair price for a jod done even if i were the richest man on earth. Just out of respect to money and to the job.

I’d probably give away the money to charity then. But this would have nothing to do with charging money in the first place.

It’s ok to charge money.

Easy, encounter financial stress. A lot of wealthy capitalists were motivated by escaping poverty.