Quoted a 5-page marketing site at $4,500. Just calculated my real hourly. It's $38.
Took on a marketing site for a B2B SaaS startup back in January. Five pages: home, features, pricing, about, contact. Webflow build, their existing brand, copy provided by them. I quoted $4,500 flat which is roughly where I land for a small marketing site and the scope sounded tight. Founder was responsive on the discovery call, had a Figma file from a previous designer, knew what they wanted. Green flags everywhere.
Here's how it actually went.
The Figma file was 60% done and the other 40% was "we'll figure it out in build." Fine, I can design in Webflow, no big deal. Then the copy they "had ready" arrived as a Google Doc with three different voices because three different people had written sections. I ended up rewriting headlines on four of the five pages just so the site didn't read like a hostage note.
Pricing page turned into its own project. They wanted a toggle for monthly/annual, then a comparison table, then a third tier got added halfway through because they were "testing positioning." Each change was small. Each change was an hour. None of them were in scope.
Then the integrations. "Can we just hook up HubSpot forms?" Sure. "And Calendly on the contact page?" Sure. "And can the pricing CTAs go to Stripe checkout instead of a contact form?" That one was a full afternoon because their Stripe was set up wrong and I ended up debugging their product config.
Launch day they asked for a blog template. Not in scope. I said yes anyway because we were "almost done."
I tracked nothing during the build because fixed fee, why bother. After launch I went back through my Webflow project history, my Loom recordings, the Slack channel timestamps, and my own calendar. 118 hours across nine weeks.
$4,500 divided by 118 is $38.13 an hour.
My posted day rate works out to about $90/hr. I tell prospects $90. I believe I'm a $90/hr web designer. On this project I was a $38/hr web designer who also does free copywriting and Stripe debugging.
The part that's eating at me is I have no idea if this was the worst project of my year or an average one, because I've never tracked any of the others. Every fixed-fee site I've built in the last two years is a black box. I could be losing money on half of them and I literally would not know.
So I'm asking the room: do you actually track hours on your fixed-fee builds? Not the ones where you're billing hourly, the flat-rate stuff. And if you do, what was the project that made you start?