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As someone who builds furniture professionally, this article wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. As other folks have pointed out, one of the hardest things to figure

As someone who builds furniture professionally, this article wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. As other folks have pointed out, one of the hardest things to figure out is what to value your own time at, and the article doesn't really touch that beyond "the customer is paying you to do it because they can't do it themselves". One of the trade offs I find myself making is when I'm doing something new. There's a certain amount of inefficiency, and sometimes you end up having to pay yourself less hourly to hit a more-or-less established price point for something. Sometimes that's worth accepting for the sake of doing something new or developing a new set of skills, but you don't want to do too much of that either!

jay_kyburz 5y ago
You could look at it this way - your time is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. If you don't have a job and can't get one, your time is worth $0. If you get a job a MacDonalds you time is worth about $10 an hour. If you make products, your time is worth what you can sell the product for divided by the amount of time you worked on the product. There is no upper or lower limit. Some people make $1M a year, some make $0. Update. The real question is, "Should I keep making furniture given how well it sells, or should I go get a job at MacDonalds?". There is far more than money to consider in that question.
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  McDonalds, shit. I used to write software. There's definitely more to it than the hourly rate. Just the same, it's a good thing my wife's job offers good health insurance :-) Back to pricing though: I shoot for an hourly rate when I quote things knowing full well that sometimes I won't hit it if I run into unanticipated learning opportunities. Sometimes I price myself out of work/the customer doesn't have a realistic expectation for what a thing should cost. It is what it is. Hilariously, I have a friend in the trade who's married to a pricing analyst. He has as much trouble pricing his work as anybody else I know.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

You could look at it this way - your time is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. If you don't have a job and can't get one, your time is worth $0. If you get a job a MacDonalds you time is worth about $10 an hour. If you make products, your time is worth what you can sell the product for divided by the amount of time you worked on the product. There is no upper or lower limit. Some people make $1M a year, some make $0. Update. The real question is, "Should I keep making furniture given how well it sells, or should I go get a job at MacDonalds?". There is far more than money to consider in that question.

mauvehaus 5y ago
McDonalds, shit. I used to write software. There's definitely more to it than the hourly rate. Just the same, it's a good thing my wife's job offers good health insurance :-) Back to pricing though: I shoot for an hourly rate when I quote things knowing full well that sometimes I won't hit it if I run into unanticipated learning opportunities. Sometimes I price myself out of work/the customer doesn't have a realistic expectation for what a thing should cost. It is what it is. Hilariously, I have a friend in the trade who's married to a pricing analyst. He has as much trouble pricing his work as anybody else I know.