From my personal view and observation, I would like to say that web designer freelancer does grow big from day to day. It was like the mushrooms after a rainy day. The pop out here and there, selling their skills to build a website, but not necessarily the whole package, perhaps, just a design or some coding work.

With this situation on the market, clients seem to overlook those good freelancer and offer them a really low price. A price where it is only sufficient to build one plain HTML page, and nothing more. But, they asked for something as big and awesome as social site or heavy influence of professional site browsing experience. All these feature cost the developers creative thinking, his intelligence copyright and hard work just to make sure the project that they working on, is up to the optimum level, the best of the best.

If some of you wonder why sometimes, a single project can cost up to thousands? and some are up to tens of thousands? It is because the professional experience, the copyright and such. Furthermore, this is the cost which going to pay their house bill, car fuel, insurance and monthly salary. You? Gossiping and hanging around your office, yet, received your monthly payment. Have ever you think about your boss, if the company has no project, will he be able to pay your pocket money? Even his own monthly payment? Think.

However, there is another factor which related to this underpaid freelancer issue: it is caused by those who bring down the market value. The people, who received project for the sake of having more project and yet deliver a very low quality result. They even offer a very low price for their services, just to hooked on to a project, which supposed to cost them more. This freelancer supposed to realised, when they did this, they even make themselves suffer due to the workload and expectation from the client.

They supposedly evaluate the market first, how much it will cost them to run the development of the project, and why it is reasonable to charge the client with higher value. If they started fresh, it is quite reasonable to have lower price than the other, but don’t  get too low. Because, in the end, whenever you’re about to increase the price, it is going to be hard because the client has set their mind that the project only cost them very little amount of cash.

Be aware of being used. Please. Give them as equal to what they paid. If you giving out too much, you’ll end up eating maggie mee and tap water soon enough because you end up having high roll-over.

Anyhoo, this is just my two or three cents. Do comment if I got anything wrong here and there.