by Jessica Hische (via swissmiss), now here for your pleasure:
Problems with working for free:
- you spoil the market, people think what you do come easy and expect the industry to deliver for ridiculous ‘prices’
- people take advantage and keep coming back for more
- you devalue your work. Or if you look at it another way you over-value your work to the point of ‘priceless-ness’
- because your ‘clients’ keep coming back you compromise on the time spent on paid work
- sometimes the accounts don’t tally. Oftentimes you don’t get paid for your consultation time, the meetings you go into, your transportation, costs of supplies/material
- sometimes you don’t even have creative freedom, or work gets shot down
- you still get ridiculous timelines
- you may not appear to be taking your work/business seriously
- little business-to-business relationship building. Think about it, once you cannot offer the free service any longer, you could pushed aside for someone ‘affordable’
This was originally posted here, but every time I get a request to do "work-for-free" I get the urge to pop back over to the chart to confirm the churning in my gut.
