Calculate a value-based price in a few simple steps

The base price is the service-level starting value before any client or project factors are applied. It is derived by multiplying the base rate by the estimated typical hours for a given service — hours that reflect both the relative workload and the actual time a creative would realistically spend on it. This figure is not what you charge; it’s an intermediate step the rest of the calculation builds on. Two services with different scopes will have different base prices, which is what makes the system scalable: adding a new service only requires estimating its typical hours.

Adjusts the base rate to reflect the economic relationship between you and your client. It compares Cost of Living + Rent (CLR) and Local Purchasing Power (LPP) for both locations against each other, using data from Numbeo. If your client is based in a wealthier city or country than you, the factor increases your rate — and vice versa. To protect your cost of living, the factor is capped at a minimum of 0.9, meaning it will never reduce your rate by more than 10% regardless of the economic gap.

Reflects how much value your client's sector can realistically extract from creative work. Industries are classified using the UN's International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), and each category is assigned a factor based on profit margin data from Aswath Damodaran's research at NYU Stern. Those margins are standardized and scaled to a range of 0.7–2.2. A client in a high-margin industry — say, software or finance — will carry a higher factor than one in a low-margin sector like non-profits or agriculture. This is not a judgment about the client; it is a structural reflection of what your work is worth in their context.

The data has limitations. It is US-centric, only uses data from publicly traded companies and is updated once a year in January. The goal is not to predict the exact budget of a specific client, but to prevent systematic underpricing across industries, and we believe the data set is sufficient for this purpose.

Accounts for the scale of impact your work will have. A larger company has more touchpoints, more revenue dependent on the work, and greater risk exposure — meaning they extract more value from the same deliverable than a small client would. This logic follows the font licensing model pioneered by Dinamo Typefaces, adapted here for broader creative services. The factor increases with employee count, and it applies to both your own company size and your client's, reflecting that your experience and overhead are also part of the pricing equation.

We classify a company as a startup when it is built for rapid growth and future scale rather than immediate profitability. These businesses often prioritize acquiring users, validating a product, or expanding into a market before becoming profitable. This may involve external funding, but it can also apply to bootstrapped companies following a similar growth model.

Local or traditional businesses typically need sustainable revenue early and operate within tighter margins.

An influencer is a brand that is dependent on a single person and their personality. It can even be a celebrity like musicians. The reason we separated this from “soloprenuer” and “company” is that the impact of these brands is dependent on the following size and influence of the personality behind the brand, which required a different factor logic. Solopreneurs are founders working with a “traditional” business that is not dependent on online followers. Technically they are treated like companies, just with a lower factor.

Faktor is a web-based pricing calculator for creative services. It is an innovative interpretation of ‘value-based pricing’. Faktor uses a base price via an hourly rate that is dependent on your and your client's location. Factors are then applied to the base price according to the data you input. Things like client size and industry weigh more into the final quote than the hours. While we use an hourly rate to establish the base price, this is not an hourly rate calculator, nor do we generate an hourly-based price.

Fakor can be beneficial to anyone who feels insecure or inexperienced about pricing creative services. It is especially helpful for beginners who lack experience pricing their work. Faktor is not only a guide but also a framework to simplify your process. Not everyone wants to sit down and spend hours on a single quote, and with Faktor you can generate one in minutes. We also see potential for businesses to use Faktor as a reference for how much budget they should allocate for creative services.

Faktor is designed for creatives pricing work directly for end clients — the businesses, brands, or individuals who will actually use and benefit from the work. If you are a freelancer subcontracting for a creative agency, or an agency billing another agency, Faktor is not the right tool. In those cases, the client extracting value from your work is not the end client, and the industry and size factors lose their meaning. Simply use an hourly rate instead.

Faktor is designed for simplicity. Input information about you/your company, your client’s information, your services and generate a quote in minutes. You should have the following information at hand:

• if you are VAT-liable or not
• your location, experience level, company size
• your clients industry, company size, company type
• the services you want to offer

• Creator: location, experience level, company size
• Client: location, industry, company size (for businesses), funding stage (for startups), follower count (for artists/influencers)
• Services specific factors: are applied based on scope when applicable
• Optional fees & discounts: e.g. offer a loyalty discount, apply a rush fee, add payment processing fees. These are applied last.

We currently only support services that we have experience invoicing ourselves. If you don’t see your service and would like to help us expand our service catalogue, please contact us.

No mathematical model is perfect. We meticulously added, tested and adapted parameters until we felt confident that the calculator generates realistic quotes. While they are quite precise, there will always be cases where you might want to intervene. What the calculator can do is show you your earning potential, especially if you haven’t worked with big companies or high-value industries yet. We are transparent with our methodology to keep the discussion open for suggestions and changes.

Faktor can supplement a proposal or give you an overview of your scope, but a successful proposal should include more than just a price breakdown. If you need more guidance on what to include in a proposal, check out our blog for resources for your business.

Faktor can generate a quote, and it can give you an idea of what you should be charging based on your client, the scope and your unique situation. It is not a proposal or a contract generator. While Faktor can give you confidence in your price, it does not replace negotiations with your client. If you still feel unsure about charging the price you generated with our tool, we suggest checking out the resources on our blog, to gain more understanding about pricing creative services.

Simply ask the company for their employee count, it‘s a non-invasive question. If they don’t want to tell you, you can either check their LinkedIn, via Clay, or Google for an estimate.

You can take a quote and run with it yes. While we believe Faktor generates accurate quotes, bear in mind that no mathematical model is perfect. There may be aspects in your project that require a higher or lower price than the quote Faktor provided you with.

Faktor is tested for project-based scopes but does not support things like long-term retainers, projects with zero budget but high return (rare but do exist), projects for friends/family, public sector/regulated budgets and maintenance work.

If you are unsure about the price generated, check out our blog for more resources and education on pricing.

The prices generated aim to be fair and appropriate. They reflect the value that a creative provides while neither under, nor over charging.

It is a good reference point, but doesn’t replace your individual business judgment. In the long term we aim to become the standard reference point for pricing creative work, but for now Faktor is one option among many to create a price that works for you.

Hourly rates are a straightforward strategy to generate prices based on your personal costs and earning goals. Where hourly-based pricing falls short is taking client context into account. At Faktor we believe your value goes up the bigger your client is. A small local business will have a different budget, return and risk factor than a multi-million-dollar corporation and your prices should reflect that.

Faktor is a growing product, and future features will likely be behind a paywall, however the functionality you see here today will be free forever. Faktor is 100% self-funded and was created in our free time. We have invested a significant amount of time and private savings to create this tool. If you want to support us you can donate to us here.

The idea and concept for Faktor was created without AI. We use AI as a partner to double check the applicability of our ideas. For example, we used it to help us create a solid formula for the location factors that adjust the hourly rate. Most of our work and brainstorming was manual and we thoroughly discussed and implemented each step as a human team.

This logic is based on the font licensing approach introduced by Dinamo Typefaces which changed the type industry. It is a straight-forward way to price based on company size. The bigger a company is, the more value they can extract out of your service. They are likely to have more touchpoints where your design is key, and more sales that depend on the success of your work. Larger projects also come with more risk and responsibility, which can only be considered if you factor this into your price.

If a company has a large budget, their return on investment is high, and when you are taking on more risk you should charge more than you would charge a small local business with an entirely different context. This is standard practice among large, established agencies, and big clients expect to pay more than their smaller counterparts.

Faktor is just one of many tools you can use to ensure profitability. We cannot guarantee economic success for anyone.

We currently do not save or store any data that is entered. You may sign up for our newsletter if you want, but your email is not required to generate a quote. Your email address is only stored if you enter it AND hit subscribe. If you subscribe you agree to receiving emails from us. You can unsubscribe at any time via the link in our newsletter. To stay up to date with how your data is used check our privacy policy.

At this stage our main focus will be taking in feedback from our peers and users to improve the accuracy of our product. One major feature we are working on is the ability to export your quote as a PDF that you can use for a proposal or an invoice.

In the long run we want Faktor to grow into more than just a quote generator. To stay up to date on feature updates and future development sign up to our newsletter.

Designers systemically underprice high-value industries because they lack economic context. Faktor exists to reduce that imbalance.

Rebecca and Rebecca from Same Same Studio and Behind the Scope Podcast and Daniel Gremme from Studio Daniel Gremme (primarily AD at Meiré und Meiré) are the founders and creators of Faktor.

When Daniel started his own business he was curious about applying value-based pricing concepts to his pricing strategy. He explored ways to do this without asking clients about their annual profits. Thanks to his type design background and experience with font licensing he was familiar with prices based on employee count. He created an excel document to calculate prices based on industry and client size factors. Once the Rebeccas heard of this document they had the idea to create an online quote generator, and so the idea for Faktor was born.