Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Radim 2061 days ago
1) Are you doing something innovative? By definition there's no clear value to baseline against. Clients don't know what's even possible, much less how much $$$ it might bring them. So the value in "value-based" is correlated with some internal strategy / personal / brand politics. Good luck quantifying that as an external SW dev firm.

2) Doing something run-of-the-mill? Improving a process that's already in place? The client may have an idea about its ultimate specs & ROI. Even if they're able to articulate those to you – why would they?

In practice, value-based pricing comes down to "charge as much as they're willing to pay". Which is fine, that's the essence of sales. But more to do with social skills & play-it-by-ear, rather than some objective numbers you might hope to extract from a client.