How to pitch clients without doing unpaid work
Building unsolicited websites or developing products to stand out often results in hours of unpaid labor for prospects who simply ignore the message. However, attempting to avoid this by charging a design fee creates friction for simple inquiries before budgets are even established. This traps you between doing unpaid engineering for strangers and losing potential clients by asking for money too early.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1building a basic one-pager for free to use as an upsell
- 2building personal relationships with clients to understand their needs
- 3Providing a very rough feasibility and baseline price range ('starts at $X') for free to weed out tire kickers.
- 4Charging a paid prototyping, scoping, or design fee to generate an accurate quote, and crediting that fee against the final production order if they proceed.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“By that point, we've sometimes done a meaningful amount of product development for someone who may have casually sent the same image to ten manufacturers.”source ↗
“If somebody sends a simple enquiry and gets back a form asking 18 questions plus a design fee, we've created friction before they even know whether the project is remotely in budget.”source ↗
“Where do you personally draw the line between sales effort and unpaid engineering?”source ↗
“I may have invented cold calling with extra labor.”source ↗
“So instead of messaging the owner and saying, “Hey, I build websites,” I make the questionable decision to build one first.”source ↗
“Of course, the downside is that I could spend several hours building something just for the owner to hit me with the deadliest response in modern business: “Seen.””source ↗
“Is showing the work before asking for the job a smart way to stand out, or am I just doing unpaid homework for strangers?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to get paid client work right now with a cash flow crunch?
- 3Why am I spending all my time on admin instead of billable work?
- 12How do you keep track of clients, projects, deadlines, and follow-ups?
- 5What to do when a client refuses to pay without a contract
- 2How to hit reseller revenue quotas before getting clients
- 2Should you charge clients when you switch their software tools?