Absolutely! You charge a super fat risk premium. My whole point is that clients will pay significant insurance (easily 100% premium) on a flat rate project.
I don't talk about hours with my clients when doing flatrate work. I am able to be like "okay.. this should take me 10 hours.. so really it will take me 40 hours, this is eaily worth 3k to them.. if i make anywhere from 75-300/hr I am pretty happy" Then I simply quote 3k and tell them they owe nothing if I don't complete the project to specification. I am very tight on specification and only would do this on projects I fully understand.
Even when I have been explicit about risk premiums being 150% of the estimate; clients nearly always choose the flat rate over the hourly with estimate. If I truly believe my estimates; this is an obvious win for me.
This is also why I said you can't do it right away; estimates are notoriously hard to get right, you really have to be a veteran to make more money doing flat rate than hourly; but I stand by my conviction that if you are decent at estimating (within .2 - 3x of the estimated hours); clients are generally happy to pay you the risk premium at a rate that is much higher than the actual risk.
I don't talk about hours with my clients when doing flatrate work. I am able to be like "okay.. this should take me 10 hours.. so really it will take me 40 hours, this is eaily worth 3k to them.. if i make anywhere from 75-300/hr I am pretty happy" Then I simply quote 3k and tell them they owe nothing if I don't complete the project to specification. I am very tight on specification and only would do this on projects I fully understand.
Even when I have been explicit about risk premiums being 150% of the estimate; clients nearly always choose the flat rate over the hourly with estimate. If I truly believe my estimates; this is an obvious win for me.
This is also why I said you can't do it right away; estimates are notoriously hard to get right, you really have to be a veteran to make more money doing flat rate than hourly; but I stand by my conviction that if you are decent at estimating (within .2 - 3x of the estimated hours); clients are generally happy to pay you the risk premium at a rate that is much higher than the actual risk.