What to charge when the client says “just a simple site”

The problem is not your work

A prospective client asks whether you have done anything similar. You go through your inbox, find four or five URLs, and paste them into a reply with a sentence explaining that the third one has since been redesigned by someone else and the fifth one is a bit old but the layout was yours.

That email asks the client to do three jobs: open five tabs, work out which one resembles their situation, and forgive whatever they find broken. Most people will do one of the three.

What a good answer looks like

The strongest version of this reply is short, has one link, and puts the most relevant project first. Not your favourite project — the one closest to their problem. The client should recognise themselves in the first thing they see.

Three relevant projects in the right order beat nine impressive ones in no order. Every time.

Order does more work than quantity here. If they run a bakery and your bakery build is fourth, they have already formed an opinion by the time they reach it. Put it first and write one line saying why it is first.

The line of context matters more than the work

One sentence, before the projects: what you noticed about their situation, and which of these is closest to it. It reframes the whole page from “here is my stuff” to “here is my thinking about you”.

Check the links before you send

This is the boring one that costs the most. A client clicking through to a certificate warning or a 502 learns something about how you look after work after launch — which is exactly what they were trying to find out.

Every link you send is a small claim about your reliability. Make sure the claim is true at the moment you send it, not at the moment you built it.