How to sell your design work as a subscription
A business model playbook for your design services
There are many ways to price and sell your work as a freelance designer or studio. Hourly rates and flat rates are the most common. Subscriptions aren’t new, but relatively untrodden as a pricing model in the design community.
Why price design work as a subscription?
Pricing for design services usually comes in two flavors: hourly, and flat rates. Some agencies and studios have their own creative version pricing as well.
Hourly rates can work, but results in uncertainty for your client. You have to add hours and increase rates to make more money. I’d prefer flat rates over hourly, but it requires lots of work upfront—the design work, in my opinion—to properly define the constraints.
Subscriptions offer an alternative—that if done right—can align your client’s needs with your own.
Here’s how I think about subscriptions for design work
My specialty is product design. And my typical clients have been small startups. For me, my goal was to discover the problems facing the business and product, then deliver exceptional product design to solve those problems. Product design is an ongoing process that adjusts with new information and the needs of the business.
Below is how I would pitch the subscription product (my design work), instead of selling the more standard hourly or flat rates.
The pitch
I’ll work at least 4 hours on your product, and save 1 hour a week for meetings. Over the course of the week, we’ll communicate asynchronously.
During our 1 hour meeting, I’ll share design work and get your feedback. You have access to the designs at any point and can do what you want with them. You’re paying for it, you can implement it immediately if you like, or grab ideas here and there.
As we work together, we can reassess the needs of the product. The project or problem could change, maybe we could set specific milestones to get to implementation. My goal is to solve the highest value problems on a weekly basis.
The response
“Only 4 hours? That’s not going to get us what we need” the client would say. I’d respond, “We can double it, or up to 5x it if that’s what you’d like to do”. This would likely be too expensive for this type of client. Before they could answer, I’d add, “let’s start with one week. If you aren’t happy with the results, consider it a trial, no need to pay, I’ll take the designs and go on my way. No hard feelings.”
By giving the client a free week, there was no reason for them not to try. Based on the model, I would burn 5 hours maximum on this project. In the past, I would have spent 5 hours building a sales deck, or doing spec work to define the constraints for a flat-rate project.
How to price, and the target audience
I would charge $5,000 a month. Which comes out to $1,250 a week and around $250 an hour. For a designer, you can make a good salary with just two clients, or go big-tech-style and get four. For a small-but-funded startup, $60k a year feels like a big number, but if they’re smart they’ll realize it’s much cheaper than hiring a good designer. As long as you do a good job.
Subscriptions are good for startup teams who haven’t yet hired their first designer. For a technology product, a lot of times there will be a technical and non-technical cofounding team of two. If not, they’ll probably hire or contract an engineering partner pretty quick.
This leaves a hole, specifically for product design. You can find a good agency to take on more of the marketing-type design work and deliver. For product design, it’s an ongoing process. We get new information, and the product adapts. The design is edited.
An ongoing process can be scary for a small startup team. It means an expanding budget and unknown deliverables. For the designer, hourly and flat have their challenges as we talked about.
Here are some of the advantages of a subscription model.
it clarifies what the most important ask is
it saves the company/startup money
it sets expectations for work and meetings
it better enables the role of ongoing product design
it makes income more predictable for you and your studio
If you’re looking to try out a new business model for your design services, try out the subscription, and let me know how it goes.