[Schwolop]

The best way I've found to get freelance jobs is to tell people that yes you are unemployed but you're not interested in the kind of work they want done, even though you could do it in your sleep. Then when they push back, quote them an absolutely ridiculously high rate that they wouldn't possibly accept.

Then, for some reason I haven't quite fathomed yet, they often say "yeah, that's fine. See you this afternoon."

This is why, yesterday, I was paid $1000 to get someone's new laptop talking to their printer and copy some files off the hard drive of a dead PC (which in reality just had one dead stick of RAM and a family of cockroaches to whom I served an eviction notice.)

Ultimately, this is just the time value of money + "I can't be bothered learning how to do this trivial task because hopefully I'll never have to do it again." + "If I just pay this guy what he wants it'll be done today, and I can quickly forget about what it cost."

This probably only works on rich people, and because I'm not one myself it seems pretty weird. If I was rich enough, paying $1000 to not be annoyed any more probably would make sense.

[mgkimsal]

It's not necessarily just 'rich' people/clients, but the effect is more easily seen there. What you're really talking about is 'value' pricing. Figure out what value something has to someone, price based on that value, not on the value or cost of your time, and see what happens.

I did a job for someone that took 20 minutes (including time to invoice) and I sent an invoice for $200. My understanding was that they'd had a couple people trying to fix the issue for an entire day before that, and they had a TV deadline (ads going out that night with a link to a broken website). $200 was nothing compared to the time cost of adding more people who couldn't find the problem, or having their client paying to send people to a broken site. The fact that it took me 20 minutes didn't factor in to their thinking when paying the invoice.

[Schwolop]

Yeah, it is 'value' pricing, but I think key to its success is both parties having some understanding of the concept. If the vendor prices by value, and the payee doesn't grok the concept, they'll likely think it too high. In my experience, rich people tend to have a better appreciation of this.