How to Price New Services Using Your Existing Time Data

Adding a new service to your offerings feels like starting from scratch on pricing. You have nothing to compare it to. No history. No reference point. So you guess, or you look at what competitors charge, or you pick a number that feels reasonable and hope it works.

The problem is that you probably have more relevant data than you realize. You just have not looked at it that way yet.

New Services Are Usually Built From Existing Skills

If you have been doing web design and you are adding UX audit services, you have already done pieces of a UX audit inside other projects. You reviewed interfaces. You gave feedback on navigation. You identified usability issues during a redesign.

Those tasks were logged. They just lived inside a project label that did not call them audits.

Start by pulling your time logs and searching for tasks that overlap with what your new service will actually involve. Look at task notes, not just project names. You might find fifty hours of relevant work spread across the last year that you never grouped together.

What That Data Tells You

When you find those hours, you learn how long the component tasks actually take you. Not how long you think they take. Not how long someone on a forum said they take. How long they take you, doing them the way you do them.

That is the foundation of an honest rate.

If reviewing and documenting interface issues for a single user flow consistently takes you two to three hours when you look at similar work across past projects, you can build that into your new service estimate with confidence. If you assumed one hour, you just found a gap that would have cost you money immediately.

The Analog Method When There Is No Direct Data

Sometimes the new service really is new. You have never done anything close to it. In that case, you need a different approach.

Break the service into its smallest tasks. List every step. Then look at whether you have logged anything similar for each step individually.

Research phase for a new service type is similar to discovery on a consulting project. Client communication will follow the same patterns it always does. Delivery and revision cycles look the same across most work. Only the core execution is truly new.

Estimate the core execution conservatively, meaning longer than you think. Use your existing data for everything around it. That hybrid estimate will be more accurate than anything you build from industry benchmarks alone.

Set a Trial Rate, Not a Permanent One

When you launch a new service, your first price is a hypothesis. You think it will take this many hours and you need this much per hour, so you charge this amount.

Log everything. Every minute of the first two or three projects under the new service. Not just the obvious work. The setup, the client education, the extra explanation that comes with anything new, the time you spend figuring out your own process as you go.

Time-Trak's automatic screenshots during these early projects are useful here. When you review the session later, you can see what you were actually doing during a work block, which helps you write better task notes and catch time you forgot to log.

After three projects, compare what you logged to what you charged. Adjust the rate based on what the data shows, not what you hoped the service would take.

Do Not Borrow Someone Else's Pricing

Looking at what others charge for a similar service is fine as a sanity check. But their rate reflects their speed, their overhead, their client relationships, and their workflow. None of that is yours.

Your data is the only thing that tells you whether a rate actually works for your business. Everything else is guessing with a reference point.

You already have better information than you think. The work is pulling it out of your logs and using it before you commit to a number you will regret.

Track your time, bill every minute.

Time-Trak is a native Mac and Windows time tracker with a floating timer, automatic screenshots, and one-click invoicing.

Free during beta.

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