What does this job have to be worth to you?
Nine questions, about three minutes. It works out the price below which this piece of work takes money out of the business — from what you need, what you spend, and how much of your year is actually billable. What the market pays is your call, not ours.
Free, and no card. The hardest question is how many hours you can really bill, and it's the one that matters most.
Informational only — not audit, attest, legal, tax, or investment advice. The floor is arithmetic on the figures you enter. What the market will pay is not arithmetic, and nothing here estimates it.
Most pricing advice answers a question about someone else's business
Ask what you should charge and the usual answer is a survey: what competitors charge, what the going rate is, what the market will bear. All of that is worth knowing, and none of it tells you whether the work pays. Two firms doing an identical job at an identical price can be at opposite ends of profitable, because one has half the overheads or twice the billable hours. The going rate is a fact about the market. Whether you can afford to charge it is a fact about you.
The floor is the second kind of fact. It comes from three of your own numbers — what you want to take home, what the business costs to run, and how much of your year is genuinely billable — plus what this particular piece of work costs and takes. Below the floor the job removes money from the business. Above it, everything is a commercial judgment that belongs to you.
The number that decides it is the one people get wrong: billable hours. It is tempting to answer with hours worked, and a full-time year is around two thousand of them. Almost nobody bills that. Every hour spent quoting, invoicing, chasing money or finding the next job is real and unbilled, and dividing your costs across hours that never existed produces a rate that is too low. This tool flags an optimistic answer loudly and then uses your number anyway, because it is yours — but the warning is there because the error runs in the direction that costs you money quietly.
Frequently asked questions
Will it tell me what to charge?
No. It works out the floor — the price below which this piece of work takes money out of the business, given what you need to take home, what your overheads are, and how much of your year is billable. That is arithmetic. What the market will pay is not arithmetic, and nothing here estimates it.
Why does it ask how many hours I can bill, rather than how many I work?
Because the two are very different, and the billable figure is the denominator that sets your rate. Quoting, invoicing, chasing payment and selling are all real hours that no customer pays for. If you divide your costs across hours that were never billable, the rate comes out too low — which is the dangerous direction, because it tells you your price is fine when it is not.
What if the floor is higher than what people around here charge?
Then that is the finding, and it is about the business rather than the price. At those costs, those overheads and that much billable time, the work does not pay at the local rate. Something has to change — the costs, the scope, the hours, or the kind of work you take. Quoting under the floor changes none of them and hides all of them.
It asks what I think the market pays. Doesn't that just anchor the answer?
It cannot, because it is asked last and it plays no part in computing the floor. It is used only to frame the gap, and it is described throughout as your belief rather than as a fact. If you skip it, the floor is identical.