How to secretly find out what your competitors charge
When you’re first starting out as a freelancer, you may not know what to charge. There are ways to find out what hourly rate you should charge, but what about if you’re wanting to find out what the ‘industry norm’ is, even if they won’t openly tell you? What I am going to show you today is how you can find out your competitors prices so you can find the range you should keep your pricing in, in order to give your competitors a run for their money.
How to secretly find your competitors pricing
If you’ve looked around online to find out what exact prices are that people charge for the work you do and haven’t found solid figures, there’s a couple of ways you can find out. The first way is to check out Freelance Switch’s Freelance Statistic’s Report. It cost $19.99 and has a ton of information inside of it.
But what if you’ve looked that over and you want a more real-world approach (ie: knowing what the person does for a living, their quality of work and the exact prices they charge for the same work you’d be doing)? It’s as easy as sending an email.
Here’s what you do
The first thing you’ll need to do is set up a personal email account – one that isn’t attached to your business. Do not reference your business in the email name or anywhere in the email (signature).
After you’ve set the email address up, think of a project that you’d like to find out pricing on. For web designers, get a few links together to websites you like and put together an email requesting something that looks similar to those in style. For logo designers and print designers, adjust your emails according to your profession.
Make sure your email is as close to what you’d be doing as possible, this way you can find out exactly what other people are charging for the same work.
Now, find 10-15 of the top people in your industry and send them the emails; then you wait. Once you get responses from them, you can go over their emails, read their quotes and find out what they charge. At this point, you’ve got a solid base as to what the others in your industry charge for the work you will be doing.
An example email you can send
Below is a sample email that you can tailor to fit your needs.
Hey (insert name),
I was just checking out your site and I love your work. I’ve been thinking of starting a website recently and I wanted to know what the pricing would be for something like this:
I am in need of a blog design that looks similar to the following websites
- Website Name
- Another website
- Third website name
The main idea behind my site is that I want to discuss (insert topic here) and would like to have some social media integration (insert other options here).
A price quote for something like this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
(insert name)
And that’s all there is to it. Within a week or so, you could get anywhere from 10-50 quotes, depending on how many people you actually contact.
What do you think – is this a clever idea or too ‘sneaky’?
Let us know in the comments what you think. Some might think the idea is a bit too ‘sneaky’ while others look at it like a clever opportunity to find out real world pricing for their projects.
