If the work arrives in small, badly-defined pieces from people who already know you, then three things follow about how you sell. None of them is what the standard advice tells you to do.
Sell time, not the project
Value-based pricing is sold as universal advice. It works on a narrow slice of work: large, well-defined, one-off projects for clients who already know what the outcome is worth to them. Most independent work is not that.
A client who has never seen your work cannot price an outcome you have not delivered yet — a flat fee asks them to trust your guess before they have anything to go on. A block of hours is the smallest thing they can say yes to without a sign-off, a proposal or a contract. They know what an hour is.
"But hourly punishes you for being good." This is the real objection and it deserves a straight answer. It goes: you get faster, so the same job earns less — ten hours becomes seven becomes two, and you have been fined for improving.
That is true of billing by the hour after the fact. It is not true of selling hours before it. A block is an agreed number of hours at an agreed price, bought up front: five hours for $625 is five hours for $625 whether the work takes you five or two. You priced the outcome and you billed in time. The argument you were being asked to pick a side of is a false choice, and if you are twice as fast as last year, your rate rises and the block gets smaller.
Put the price on the page
There is a measurement I think about more than any other. A developer redesigned the page for a product he sells. Everyone agreed the new page was better looking. Conversion dropped 30% in a week — because the new layout pushed the price and the buy button below the fold. He moved them back up and it recovered. Nothing about the product changed.
I have been on the other side of this plenty of times. Two sites stick in my memory, a freelance developer and a psychotherapist, both clearly good at the job, neither showing a price anywhere, both routing me to a contact form. I filled in neither. I had a small problem and a card, and being asked to introduce myself and wait was more effort than the problem was worth that afternoon.
They never knew I was there. The people who leave because there is no price never appear in any of your numbers.
If your rates genuinely vary by client, publish several rather than hiding one. An hour for a funded startup and an hour for a solo founder can be two different published numbers.
Take the money first
The normal order is: agree, do the work, invoice, wait. Everything unpleasant about freelancing lives between the last two steps. A block reverses it, and that removes two problems rather than one.
The chasing becomes impossible — there is no invoice to follow up and no "just checking in" email, because the work you have done is work you were already paid for.
And the arguing about scope stops. Scope creep is usually described as a discipline problem, but that has not matched my experience. What happens is that the work moves, and saying so requires opening a negotiation about money, with somebody you like, in the middle of a job. Most people would rather absorb the hours. I have — six hours against a block of four, noticed afterwards, $250 I never mentioned.
When the hours are bought in advance nobody has to have that conversation. The block runs out, and running out is a fact rather than an accusation.
Freelancers who try careful value-based pricing often end up back on hourly for exactly this reason. Usually not because they scoped badly — because they could not face renegotiating every time the work moved.
<!-- QUOTE: someone describing the renegotiation they did not want to have -->The money is also the filter. Somebody who has paid for five hours has qualified themselves more thoroughly than any discovery call could, and the people who were never going to buy stop taking up your afternoons.
Who all of this is wrong for
If you sell a defined visual deliverable — a logo, a brand system, a site design — your client is buying the artifact rather than your time. Price it flat, and use a tool you can design. This one will get in your way.
If your clients pay through accounts payable — purchase orders, payment terms, a finance department — a card checkout does not fit their process. This issues a receipt, not an invoice.
If what you want is a job and only a job — if you would not be hired directly, at any price, by anyone but an employer — none of this reaches you. It is built for being hired for the work, not for the post.