Some clients just expect free work, you can try to train them otherwise, but it will be an uphill battle.
I've also found that the more technical you are, the more they expect free work. Almost as if they assume it won't take much effort on your part so they shouldn't really have to pay for it.
Thank you. This is a helpful thought for me.
I'm in a small town and I have better technical skills than most people around me and I'm not even charging that much, but I can't seem to get taken seriously. This is something to contemplate.
The reason I ask is that over the years, I've been on both the buying and selling side of technical products and services. And I've noticed it's common that extremely price-sensitive customers won't take you seriously no matter how little you charge.
On the flip side, customers who understand the ROI they'll get from your work often won't balk at prices higher than you think are reasonable.
But I know that it's not always possible to just start charging more, depending on what you sell and who you sell it to.
I'm relatively new to town and I am a freelance writer and blogger by trade and I know something about creating an online business because of it. I feel like if I am too critical of what other website people do who are more long-time locals, I'm basically cutting my own throat.
There's a lot of factors and they are hard to tease out. I feel like no one online would likely pay me to help them set up a blogspot site. I spend a lot of time on Hacker News and people here role their own and probably wouldn't see any value in paying me for what I know about the backend of blogspot and how to do design work in that venue.
I'm more technically inclined than most locals and there's a big chasm between me and them on trying to convey why what I do has value. I can see value in it, but I don't know how to explain it and I am not good at sales. I have experience doing volunteer work and I sort of fell into doing more of that, which I can't really afford to do because I'm a dirt poor freelancer. I need to find a way to improve my income.
The activities I mentioned arent expected. In fact, they are usually unexpected which makes them all the more special.
Not sure that helps specifically but it did occur to me as I read your post.
My experience with doing nice things for people that they didn't expect is that they either latch onto me as a mommy figure and treat me abusively or conclude I'm hitting on them and they would like to hit that. The idea that I'm just social and warm and I see this as a diplomatic thing to do seems to never occur to people. They always and consistently interpret it as extremely personal and latch onto me in a problematic fashion and it doesn't go good places for me business-wise that leads to money.
I've been trying to sort that out for years and I feel I have made some progress, but it's far from a solved problem.
This doesn't fit my experience at all. People just expect me to do things for them for free out of the goodness of my heart, and expected that even when I was literally homeless.
I've never entirely figured out why that is.
If people just found ways to give me money because I do useful stuff, I think I would have long ago stopped being poor. But I'm still poor and I routinely get treated like I'm some kind of beggar for trying to find some way to monetize my work.
So I think there's probably a bit more to it than that.