Read a bit of your post, I'll go back to it in a bit. Number one tip is, even if you're not billing by value, you should bill on much larger increments than an

Read a bit of your post, I'll go back to it in a bit. Number one tip is, even if you're not billing by value, you should bill on much larger increments than an hour. My recommendation is to bill in day increments and invoice weekly. You can of course track hours if that helps, but never bill the customer for them directly. Decide on how many hours a "day" of productive work is for you and at the end of the week divide the number of hours you worked by that. You should also charge more than feels comfortable for your day. Raise your rate with each new client until you don't have enough work in the pipeline, then back off a bit. Those two things should provide better clients who expect a realistic amount of work for what they're paying.