The Service You Added Without Repricing Yourself

You got a request for something adjacent to what you normally do. You figured it out. You delivered it. The client was happy. You charged them about what you would have charged for your core work.

Then you got another request for the same new thing. And another. Somewhere along the way it became a service you offer. You never sat down and priced it properly. You just kept doing it at the rate that felt close enough.

Close enough is usually not close enough.

New services have hidden costs your old rates do not cover

When you add a service you are still learning, everything takes longer. That is fine and expected. But if you do not account for that in your pricing, you are subsidizing your own learning curve with unbilled hours.

There is also setup time you will not have once the service matures. Research. Trial and error. Figuring out what you need to deliver the thing at a consistent quality level. None of that feels billable to a client because they did not ask you to learn. But it has a real cost.

And new services often have new overhead. Different tools. Additional subcontractors. More client communication because they are less sure of what to expect. All of that adds up.

How to see what the service actually costs you

Create a dedicated project or tag in Time-Trak for the new service from the first time you offer it. Log every hour that touches it. Not just the production hours. The learning, the setup, the client calls, the revisions.

After two or three engagements, look at the total hours against the total invoiced. Calculate your effective rate.

If you are hitting your normal rate, great. Your initial pricing was solid and you are learning fast.

If your effective rate is significantly lower, you are underpriced and you have the data to fix it.

The comparison you need to make

Pull your core service profitability for the same period. Compare it to the new service.

If your core work runs at ninety dollars an hour effective and your new service is running at fifty-five, you are either undercharging or the service is more expensive to deliver than your pricing assumes.

Knowing which one it is changes what you do next. If you are undercharging, raise the rate. If the service genuinely costs more to deliver, you raise the rate and also figure out how to make it more efficient.

Either way, you make a real decision instead of just hoping the next engagement goes better.

When to lock in the permanent rate

Do not finalize the rate for a new service based on one project. The first engagement is always an outlier. There is too much unknown.

But by the third project, you have a pattern. You know roughly how long discovery takes, how many revisions are typical, how much client communication to expect. At that point you have enough data to price confidently.

Set the rate then. Write it down somewhere official. Stop pricing by feel.

The other thing tracking shows you

Sometimes you run this analysis and find out the new service is actually more profitable than your core work. That is also worth knowing. It might mean you should be offering it more prominently or shifting your business in that direction.

You will not know either way without the data. Log the hours from day one, review after a few engagements, and price the service on what it actually takes to deliver it.

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.

macOS + Windows · Floating widget · Auto screenshots