7 Pricing Strategies For Recurring Subscription Freelance Clients

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 307

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're an audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Subscription pricing as a freelancer is the holy grail of business models for us. It's very difficult to implement. Many people never find a way to do it, but if you can do it, it can be wonderful for stability in your business.

Last week's episode, I talked in detail about this, around how to shift from one-time packages to subscription or recurring revenue packages as a freelancer. And there was so much interest and conversation around that episode that I wanted to dive into this further because I found one common thread that I saw amongst the conversations that I saw. And that is people try this, they get the subscription pricing model wrong, and you end up running yourself ragged. Clients will take advantage of you, not out of spite or meanness. They just take advantage of the thing that they're paying for. Or clients really resist to joining your subscription offer or service, or they outright reject it altogether. And so you just give up and say, this just didn't work for me, this doesn't work for my industry. And this makes sense. A lot of people try this, and that's the result that they get. And the reason I say this makes sense is because freelancers are just not sophisticated business owners. We are solo owner-operators.

We rarely have outside influence. We don't really understand the best practices and best strategies for the recurring subscription, revenue, business, because you haven't studied the model. You don't know what works and what doesn't work.

Fortunately, that information is out there. There are many, many, many, many businesses out there that are offering subscription pricing to their customers or clients.

And just about every iteration and version under the sun has been tested at this point. So I'm just gonna give you seven pricing strategies to consider. These aren't things that you have to do. These are just things that if you're going to move down this route of moving from one-time packages to subscription packages or retainer packages, or you've tried it before and you wanna try it again, these are seven strategies to consider. If you can actually get this done right, you're gonna have more revenue as a freelancer, you're gonna have more stability, more predictability, you're gonna have a clear understanding of how many clients you can actually take on to, quote, fill your roster, which should be the goal when you have a subscription recurring freelance offer, because you understand the workload involved with delivering on this monthly recurring package that you're giving your clients. And when you understand the workload, then you can understand how many clients you can reasonably take on before running yourself ragged, which means when you fill your roster, then you have stability in your freelance business. And if you get all of this right, it is a wonderful world. If you get this stuff wrong, it is a painful way to learn hard lessons as a freelancer. So before I get into those seven strategies, if you haven't heard of this podcast before, or you haven't listened to the show before and it's your first time, welcome. So glad to have you here. This podcast is for freelancers who offer creative services and you wanna make more money from those services without selling your soul. We have 306 other podcasts in our backlog for you to go explore and enjoy, all related to that same central topic of making more without selling our souls. Except for a few weeks ago, I talked about the actual making the case for selling your soul, but that's a one-off, and it was a fun episode to do. Sometimes I like playing the devil's advocate. So let's dive into this. We got seven strategies to talk about. I also have a bonus I wanna talk about, actually two bonuses. I'll start with a bonus, I'll end with a bonus.

There aren't really strategies, but things to consider when you're doing this. And the first bonus I wanna talk about is something called value-based pricing.

You could maybe call this a strategy, but I don't really think it's a strategy. I just think it's an approach to pricing that's worth talking about. So when we're talking about creating value for our clients, ultimately the thing that they're actually paying us for, value does not equate to hours spent with our clients. Another way of thinking about that or saying this is, the time we spend with our clients, the hours we are spending with our clients or working for our clients, that is not what the client is paying for. They're paying for the end result.