[brudgers]

There is a simpler solution. Charge more money for your freelance work. Higher fees compound. Cost savings diminish. Even better higher fees select for better clients. Working for clients where profits depend on your cost savings is a race to the bottom. And when clients pay more you can afford to outsource the work of setting up cost savings processes instead of doing the work yourself. There's nothing wrong with saving money, but that's not the purpose of a business.

[fierarul]

Yes, easy, just charge more! I wonder why doesn't everybody just do it? Because it's non-trivial, it involves risk and you might end up making less money!

While cost saving has almost no risk. Here's a relevant piece of the article:

> But what if it's a 6-month project and instead of billing them 1000 per month, you are billing them 10.000 per month?

> Now you could have saved €150 per month for 6 months, meaning you lost €900 just on currency conversion on this project. Ouch!

> It could very well be that you can buy a brand new MacBook Pro every few years with just the savings on your international payments.

A business is also not good if you just let money slip through your fingers.

[brudgers]

Charging more is harder than shopping for ways to save money and less pleasurable than dreaming of new MacBooks. Yes there is risk. Mostly of rejection. And rejection is painful and saving money sounds like what a responsible adult does and charging more just because you can doesn’t come with universal social approval. Your clients know this if they are hard negotiating on fees they are using that knowledge to their advantage.

The premise of the scenario is the freelancer is absorbing the risks of currency exchange. The client is not compensating the freelancer for the currency risk. The only way the freelancer gets compensated is by charging more or placing the risk on the client by requiring payment in the freelancer’s local currency. Neither creates a dependency on a third party, their API’s, business model, or terms of service. All of those are a distraction from doing the things that are the basis of the business.

[fierarul]

> charging more just because you can

You can try to charge more, but it's rarely obvious you will receive that extra money.

Currency risk is a cost of doing exports. Of course, sometimes it's also advantageous if your local currency is devaluing against the customer's currency.

[ska]

This is only half right. By all means adding 20/hr to your rates is more viable that faffing about trying to reduce every $20 fee.

On the other hand, this problem is partly fees, partly rates. The fee part gets taken care of by making sure you can absorb them as cost of business. The rate part doesn't, it grows with your revenue. So it's bad business to ignore it.

Freelancers are in a weird place on this because of the size of income. Just handwaving with numbers, if you are exchanging 10k the most you can save is about $100 or so, not worth a lot of time. At 100k though it's often worth it. At a million in forex, you are being irresponsible not to chase a good rate.

So freelancers usually fall somewhere around the middle, where there are real savings possible but it isn't worth a ton of time. Personally the last time I did this sort of thing 15 minutes on the phone saved me a few thousand a year so worth it.