It’s OK to work for free, but you shouldn’t

 As a digital creator who has spent the entirety of his adulthood online, I’ve been battling with the concept of charging for freelance work. For the majority of my digital life, charging was a weird concept and I’ve always undervalued my work because of it. Growing up, one thing could not become more clear: the more I made on a project, the harder I worked on it.

At first, it’s hard to value your work. I tried making online YouTube videos and did reach some sort of success, making around $200 total over five years of having a personal channel with video blogs and interviews with musicians, along with a separate channel where I played video games (mostly The Sims).

With both channels, I capped at 600–700 subscribers and my top videos on my personal channel had view counts of 19K, 4K, and 3.5K respectively. My top videos on my gaming channel, by contrast, levied a bit more popularity with several videos at over 5K views, the top one hitting 9,500.

Clearly, I wasn’t getting famous for these YouTube video blogs I would post several times a week and I actually enjoyed doing it until I felt like I was being pushed from the platform because the algorithm has changed so much. I’m not complaining, I just lost interest.

At 22, I started taking more freelance work. I would create lyric videos for bands, even had a publicity company that would represent several different musicians I had connections with. There was a lot of cool stuff to make.

As I kept doing it, I started to understand the time and effort I’m actually worth, regardless of how good it is. People who aspired to quit their own day jobs and start freelancing would also raise questions like: “how do you decide how to charge?”

The problem was I hadn’t.

I didn’t have a clue. It’s hard to value your own work until you consider the mindset that everything you make has value. Even if it’s $40 for a logo you didn’t work very hard on. That’s what I charged a friend for her dad’s birthday present — a little web graphic that took me 20 minutes to put together.

Of course, giving people prices becomes a little dicey depending on the service. I offered websites for an incredibly inexpensive price. It’s not like I had an educational background or anything. I wanted a resume to build and web coding is a way for me to constantly use my brain. It’s the perfect logic exercise for someone who hates math.

I offered a full design to a music connection for $100 plus money for the domain ($12). Considering that web hosting is usually introduced around $150/year, or at least that’s what I paid, I was giving it away for almost nothing, let alone the skills I had.

The response wasn’t the most accepting as I was just left on ‘read’ via Facebook Messenger. At first, interactions like that hinder positive growth when trying to decide your work’s value, but once you realize that everyone just wants something for free, you don’t even feel bad for wanting fair value for a good product.

I stopped discounting too since I knew if there was any cut on pricing, the work wouldn’t hardly be worth what they end up paying since I literally just won’t care. And as a creator, you never want to be known for half-baked products. The only way I knew to avoid that hole was to sell myself as though I had value because I did.

When should you work for free?

The tired argument tends to be:

Exposure doesn’t pay the bills.

And they’re right. It’s exhausting to explain this to people.

I’ll never forget the episode of BoJack Horseman where they reference the “exposure” Todd was going to make. It’s one of the best running jokes among creators. There are a few instances where exposure helps but remember: it’s on your terms.

As of recent, I never accept free jobs for any clients. Sometimes, if syndication could help build my resume, I’m not hard-pressed if money isn’t involved. It’s not like I’m fully supported by a single stream of revenue.

You aren’t required to work for “exposure” and you aren’t even required to offer friends and family a discount. Some photographers even tell dark stories of potential clients questioning an $80 price point when it’s at the low end of the grand scheme of photo pricing.

Lightroom and Photoshop are $10/mo; if the creator does anything else creative, each program is around $20/mo, or the Adobe Creative Suite is around $50/mo; a DSLR camera is between $300–400, a mid-range could be $500–600, and a good one is $1,000 or more, plus the lenses that cost more than the camera body. Then take into account the skills required to take the gig. It takes a lot of clients just to break even, let alone make a profit.

As a consumer of these services, pay people what they’re worth, or politely decline and shop around. It’s not wrong for people to charge you for their time and skillset.

Over time, I’ve sort of fell into writing and podcasting. Both are nice skills to have since they both don’t require very much capital to start.

Do you have a computer? Cool. How about headphones with a mic? Neat, you can start a podcast. For years, my microphone was literally just Apple headphones while I saved up for a more expensive microphone.

It’s especially easy to podcast since Anchor makes podcast creation so simple. They make monetizing it even easier with built-in ad partnerships that brands can reach out to you for. This isn’t an ad, I just really love Anchor.

It’s easy to grab together some gear, hone your skills, and start gathering clients. It’s not as easy to develop a pricing model you’re comfortable with. But don’t worry, you’re likely not alone.

Obviously, the term “easy” is hyperbole since just going out and creating for clients is much harder than so many make it look. But it can definitely be worth it.