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Hey Freelance Friends!
Welcome to all our new readers, the Freelance Forward community has grown a lot this week, so it’s the perfect moment to reintroduce one of our most useful tools. If you've been freelancing for any amount of time, you already know that pricing is one of the messiest parts of this life. Most people don’t actually calculate anything. They pick a number that feels “reasonable”, or they charge whatever their last job paid them, or they let a client tell them what their work is worth. And then they wonder why they’re stressed, exhausted, fully booked, and still not earning what they should.
This is exactly why we built the Profreelance Freelance Rate Calculator bot, a tool that forces a little honesty, a little maths, and a lot of clarity into your pricing decisions. No more emotional guesswork. No more apologetic rates. No more “I’ll just charge what feels fair”. You’re running a business, not a charity drive.
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Here’s the link to the bot:
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6873eadee248819188abe3cf90e6f60e-profreelance-freelance-rate-calculator
What makes this tool so useful is how simple it is to talk to. You don’t need spreadsheets or formulas or a secret MBA tucked under your bed. You just chat to it like you’d chat to a friend:
“I want to make R30k a month but I’m not sure what hours I can realistically bill.”
“My client says my hourly rate is too high, is it?”
“I want to set a retainer price but I don’t know how to calculate the hidden time and admin.”
And the bot calmly walks you through the logic you’ve probably been avoiding.
For example, if you tell it you want to earn R25k a month as a beginner and you’re only working four hours a day, it doesn’t judge you, it just gives you the rate that makes those numbers make sense. If you ask whether R450/hr is too expensive, it tells you the truth based on your workload and expenses, not your insecurities. If you want to build a retainer package, it helps you break down the invisible labour you always forget to charge for: research, strategy, community management, reporting, revisions, admin, communication, all the non-glamorous stuff that takes more time than the actual deliverables.
What freelancers love about this tool is how it allows you to make decisions from a grounded place. It doesn’t inflate your ego and tell you to charge R2,500 an hour because you’re a “premium brand”, and it doesn’t encourage race-to-the-bottom pricing either. It simply shows you the numbers behind your business, the real numbers, so you can stop relying on vibes and client pressure. Once you see your actual minimum sustainable rate, you can’t unsee it. You stop bending over backwards for clients who expect miracles for R150. You stop overworking because you finally understand why you feel burnt out. You stop treating your pricing like a personality trait.
If you’re new here, try this: open the bot and type,
“Calculate my real hourly rate.”
Answer honestly. Let it do the maths. Then compare the result to what you currently charge. Most people gasp. Then they raise their rates. Then, magically, freelancing starts to feel like something they can build a life around rather than survive on.
The Profreelance Freelance Rate Calculator isn’t meant to tell you who you are as a freelancer; it’s meant to stop you from unintentionally sabotaging yourself. Use it as a baseline, a sanity check, a pricing mentor in your pocket. It’s one of the simplest tools we’ve built, but also one of the most powerful, because clarity is priceless when you’re building your own income from scratch.
Here’s the link again for easy access:
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6873eadee248819188abe3cf90e6f60e-profreelance-freelance-rate-calculator
— The Profreelance Crew
Tool of the week
Cushion
If the Rate Calculator helps you charge properly, Cushion helps you breathe properly. It’s a financial planning tool built specifically for freelancers, the kind of tool that quietly shows you the truth about your workload, your income patterns, and those suspicious “slow months” that always seem to catch you off guard.
Cushion lets you map out your projects, your expected income, and your availability so you can actually plan your freelance life instead of reacting to it. It shows you which months might overflow, which ones might run dry, and how your pricing changes affect your long-term stability. In other words: it’s the tool that stops you from living in permanent feast-and-famine mode.
If you’ve just recalculated your rate using the Profreelance bot, Cushion is the next step; it turns that number into a real, predictable income instead of a hopeful guess.
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PROFREELANCE (Pty) Ltd
2023/279056/07
The content in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or professional advice. Pro Freelance and Freelance Forward are not affiliated with or endorsed by the platforms or tools mentioned (unless stated otherwise), and we are not liable for any losses, damages, or issues arising from your use of them. Always do your own research before making decisions related to your freelance business.