At the 2013 ExpressionEngine Conference I gave a talk entitled “Pricing ExpressionEngine for Success.” What follows is a transcript of my talk, with slides containing the survey results that I shared during the talk. 
Welcome everyone. Thank you for sticking around for the last session at the ExpressionEngine conference. Brad Parscale and team have done an amazing job putting this together for us. Today we are going to talk about Pricing ExpressionEngine for Success. Just as a little introduction, I own Jovia Web Studio, an ExpressionEngine-focused web agency. I am also the cofounder of Director-ee.com, an online ExpressionEngine community site and the official job board for ExpressioneEngine. Another project that I’m involved with is Harpoon (harpoonapp.com), a financial planning app for freelancers (are you a freelancer? Check it out). Some of the questions that I hope to answer for you today are:
How do others price their services?
How much should I be charging?
How do I raise my rates?
And hopefully, you’ll have these additional takeaways:
How to position yourself for success
How others are pricing their services
The average income of an EE developer
How your prices affect how clients perceive you
I’d like to start by asking you to use your imagination for a moment. Imagine that you have a new client that comes to you for a really rough ballpark figure for the following services:
Design a website
Marked up Responsively
E-commerce
Blog
Control Panel for Multiple Authors
Landing Page Tool
Responsive Image Gallery
Image Editing Tools
Progressive Image Loading
Tie in a CDN
Tie in Dropbox
Social Network Sharing
Auto-Tweets
Facebook Page Integration
Google Analytics Setup
Disqus Commenting Engine
Google Maps
Form Builder that submits to Google Docs or Mailchimp
Password-protected site areas
Can you imagine a range of prices that you would charge a client to build them this type of site? Depending on the company or freelancer, I’d imagine the prices starting at thousands of dollars, up to and even over $100,000 depending on the agency. What if I told you you can have this site launched…tonight…for $8/month. Services such as Squarespace are piling on features, executing them well, and commoditized the cost of a website. So how do we compete with this? Well, if you are simply trying to sell someone a website, then you are going to have a hard time beating out the costs of these powerful tools. Hopefully many of you are thinking about all of the things that you bring to the equation outside of the actual website… things like quality custom design and business & marketing consultation. You have to position yourself as a business partner. So if we are going to move away from treating our services like a commodity, how do we price a “Business Partnership”?
From these responses, it seems that people are doing one of the following four things in regards to pricing strategy:
Flat Project Fee
Flat Value Fee
Hourly x Total Hours
Hourly x Range of Hours
To find out what the ExpressionEngine community as a whole was doing here, I sent out a survey via Twitter a few months ago, broadcast to the #eecms hash tag. Out of 100 responses, this is what we discovered: 
So this hopefully gives you a broad overview of what others are doing in regards to the projects, but I was also curious how people were handling some of the nitty gritty pricing issues, like Add-ons. Do people itemize the addons needed, or just absorb them into the cost of the project? 
If people are absorbing them into the cost of the project, I was then curious how people were handling the licensing ownership for the addons. And with ExpressionEngine itself… Since I had a survey going out, there is one question that I find helpful to know, but also should be taken with a grain of salt. It is also a taboo question to ask someone, so the anonymity of a survey makes for a great way to have insight into just what other people are pulling in doing EE development for a living. Now, there are no qualifiers here, so some folks might be working for an agency, some might be running an agency, and some might be working on EE as a side project. That being said, here are the results: This also seems to be in line with what other surveys are around the web for a web developer, with the exception of a larger amount of folks making six figures working as ExpressionEngine specialists. Some of these people have a lot of small projects, some have a few large projects, but working full-time, it paints a picture of what others are charging to fit these annual income levels. [Story of how I charged too little and lost the job] What you’ve heard so far today may inspire some of you to start raising your rates. At the very least, we should be raising our rates on a regular basis as the cost of living increases. Fortunately, I have another little video here of what some others have done to raise rates:
Pricing strategies, choosing an appropriate rate, positioning yourself correctly, and not being afraid to raise your rates are ways to maximize your project income. Another important way to increase your success as a web professional is to up your game when it comes to recurring income. You can charge recurring income for services such as hosting, content creation, photography, email marketing, SEO, SMO, SEM, backup services, upgrade services, etc. If each client that you service adds a recurring project to your roster, you can safely and reliably scale your business. In the end, you will find success in business when you treat your business like a business. Don’t just be reactive and hope for the best, but be intentional with your pricing, your positioning, and your financial goals.