This mirrors my thinking. At the end of the day you have to charge a price reasonable to the customer and sustainable to you for whatever you’re delivering and

This mirrors my thinking. At the end of the day you have to charge a price reasonable to the customer and sustainable to you for whatever you’re delivering and that’s going to fall somewhere relative to other bids and whatever Google tells them the average hours spent * rate “is”. For several of my company’s customers they don’t really want to discuss ambiguous ideals of value for cash or negotiate fixed deliverable costs. They ask “so what’s the rate, bottom line?” and we have had a LOT better results estimating and billing hourly than with fixed rate, retainers, and so forth. Not because we are bad at estimating but because there are too many variables on the SMB side that no customer will pay to hash out fully before a project begins, and even if they did, ours tend to value the flexibility provided by hourly billing.