An hourly rate prices how long you took. It is the one number in the engagement that a client should not be paying you to increase.
The studio that gets faster every year earns less every year. That is not a flaw in the execution of hourly billing, it is the arithmetic of it. Twelve years of judgement arriving at the answer in a morning is worth more, not less, than a junior arriving at it in a fortnight.
Price the decision, not the hours
We quote against scope and consequence: how many applications, how many rooms, how long the system has to survive without us. A wordmark for one room and a wordmark for a chain are different pieces of work even when the drawing takes the same afternoon.
The number is built from a table the client can read. Nothing is hidden in a blended rate.
Getting faster should not cost you money.
Fix the rounds, not the time
Every engagement names how many review rounds it contains. Two is the default and it is written into the proposal alongside what a round is and what happens if a third is needed.
This removes the fear that makes clients ask for options they do not want. It also removes the incentive for us to slow down.
Show the formula
The proposal includes the arithmetic: base for the system, a figure per additional application, a figure for the handover, and the trigger for each. Clients rarely argue with a formula they can check.
Where a project genuinely cannot be scoped, we say so and sell a paid discovery instead of guessing in public.