If you need to offer free trials to get work, do it. If you don’t need to offer free trials to get work, don’t. A related concept is the idea of solving the bi

If you need to offer free trials to get work, do it. If you don’t need to offer free trials to get work, don’t. A related concept is the idea of solving the biggest risk first in any problem. If your biggest risk as a freelancer is getting clients, then pricing at free initially might be a great idea. But if your biggest risk is something else, it might not make sense. Once someone has many clients, they’re sometimes better off doing the total opposite end of the spectrum (the opposite of a good idea is also often a good idea!) charging a fee even for what would previously have been a free consult/intro call meeting (in some markets). High paying serious clients aren’t turned off by it, so time wasted shrinks drastically. And you can always skip the fee with a serious client you’re introduced to via a referral, because you don’t care about the fee on the consult call, it’s just a weeding mechanism and a signal of seriousness and legitimacy, so if both of those aims are already accomplished because it’s via an intro you trust who makes you look good, the consult fee doesn’t matter.