Setting the Price as a Freelancer

When becoming a freelancer, not just a  translator, the inevitable question that comes up is how much we should charge our services.

Too high and nobody’s buying. Too low and we’re just going to get ourselves ragged for minimal reward. In search for the answer, I watched a video featuring one of the senior translators at the Association of Indonesian Translators (HPI) which thankfully gave me the pointers I need to set my own price.

Based from what I’ve watched, your rate should always be above the minimum rate that you have set for yourself but somewhere in the range of the market price. Minimum rate is the lowest amount of rate that you want to work for, which is determined by calculating the number of words per day you can work on, the number of hours and days that you want to work in a month, and the amount of money that you need to live in a month. The formula goes that we need to divide the amount of money that we need to live by the number of days we are willing to work in a month and divide that further by the amount of hours that we are willing to spend working in a day. The result that we get from that is the minimum per hour rate. 

We can also divide that number further by the number of words we can translate in an hour, which should lead to the minimum per word rate.

Meanwhile, the market price is the rate that is usually offered by others offering the same service. This is also an important indicator to ensure that we don’t set the price too high or too low relative to our competitors. 

Beyond the question of setting the price, one other important point that I learned from the video is the fact raising the price is harder than lowering it, especially when we’re working as a freelancer with not much bargaining power over the agencies that we’re working with. This is also in line with what I’ve learned concerning monetization in a video game--we can always lower the price later, but we can’t ever raise the price without risking losing our customer base.

If you understand Indonesian, I recommend to just watching the entirety of the video for yourself, but if you just want to know the gist of it, hopefully my summary will suffice!