Web Design Client Red Flags: What Underpriced Projects Really Cost You
There's a moment early in this conversation where Paige Jones — the designer behind Fluff Creative Studio — says something that stopped me: the clients who go looking for the cheapest possible website aren't just cheaper. They're a different kind of client altogether. Different expectations. Different asks. And usually, not the ones you actually want.
That's not the only thing she said that made me want to share this one. She told me about the rate calculator that revealed she was losing money on every project. About raising her price on every new client until someone finally said no. About building a business flexible enough that she could spend her mum's last months with her instead of getting pulled back into work. About choosing a magical Christmas over whatever the internet is calling success this year.
Paige Jones has a master's degree in software development. She still took my course. I wanted to know why — and what she's built since.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full conversation below, or keep reading.
From High-Profile Nanny to a Master's in Software Development
Paige Jones is, by her own description, a career hopper. Right before web design, she was a high-profile nanny — work she loved, with pay she calls amazing. So the jump away from it wasn't about money. It was about lifestyle. She was tired of travelling on other people's holidays, gone from her own family. She and her husband had just bought a house, and she was commuting between New York and Vermont. She needed a remote job.
So she went back to school — a master's degree in software development, not entirely sure yet what she'd do with it. Full-stack developer, maybe. Then she graduated, in the spring of 2020, straight into a hiring freeze. Nobody was recruiting. She got on Upwork because there wasn't another option, and started gravitating toward whatever she felt best at. That turned out to be design, not straight code.
The jump into web design wasn't a five-year plan. It was what was left standing when the hiring freeze hit. She hadn't even considered it a realistic option to come out the gate working for herself — until having no other option made that decision for her.
A Master's Degree Wasn't Enough — So She Signed Up for My Course Anyway
Here's the part I still find funny: she has an actual, two-year graduate degree in software development. And she still enrolled in my course.
Working for herself, she told me, was terrifying at that point. She'd tried it once before, in the startup space, and this time she genuinely needed it to work — she needed money coming in the door. She remembered something I'd written, about how you can learn all of this yourself, but the time it takes to fumble through it versus having someone who's already done it hold your hand and get you there is enormous.
Her words, not mine: "I'm not joking when I say your course taught me more than that whole master's degree."
What the degree hadn't touched at all was the part that scares most freelancers most — contracts, clients, and figuring out how to actually bill somebody for your time. For her, the concept of invoicing a client felt terrifying for a long time, degree or no degree.
The First Clients: Her Husband, Upwork, and a Bar That Didn't Exist Yet
She got her first handful of clients two ways. First, her husband hired her on Upwork — paid her properly, and left her a review. Smart, and free portfolio-building all in one.
Then she built roughly three more sites for basically nothing. One of them, she remembers charging $200 for. Her approach at that stage was to go above and beyond for whatever she could get, just to have something in the portfolio. She even built a website — unprompted, unpaid, un-asked-for — for a new bar that was about to open in her area, before it existed. Then she showed up and said: I built this. Do you want it?
That's how she started. Upwork and her husband, then word of mouth slowly took over as her actual client base.
From Upwork to 70% Referrals
Upwork got her started, but it slowly turned into something else: recurring clients, and referrals from people she'd already worked with. Today, referrals make up about 70% of her business. She's still on Upwork, but it's a much smaller slice than it used to be.
Those referrals mostly come from business partners and friends of past clients. One client alone has hired her for five different websites over the years — a serial entrepreneur who keeps branching into new companies, and she's simply been with him for the ride. A lot of nonprofits sit in her portfolio too, and those tend to circle back the same way: a new grant lands, and suddenly they're working on something new together.
Ask her what her actual marketing strategy is, and the honest answer is: there isn't a third channel. Referrals and Upwork. That's it.
What Actually Fills Her Calendar
Unlike a lot of my past students, Paige doesn't have a tight niche. Her project mix is, in her words, "a little all over the map."
She has three or four ongoing, contracted bigger clients where the work leans heavily custom — actual code, actual database management. She does a lot of data work for a big nationwide hardware store, for instance, which is genuinely code-heavy. Everything else — the regular referral base of small business owners — is really just Squarespace. Custom code only steps in when there's no plugin that does the job, or when a bit of CSS will make the user experience noticeably better.
She also does SEO, and associated graphics like pitch decks or logo design — but only ever for clients who've already hired her for the website itself. She doesn't go out marketing herself as a logo designer; the extras only exist inside a website relationship that already exists.
Do You Actually Need to Code?
So — does the two-year software development degree pay for itself? Partly. It's what gets her the bigger database-management retainer clients. But when I asked if it's necessary to become a web designer, her answer was blunt: not even a little bit.
She's a lifelong learner and would never call any of her degrees a waste. But it isn't pertinent to this particular job, and these days there are free or near-free mini courses covering exactly the fundamentals that matter — the basics of pulling block elements, inspecting a page, understanding what's actually happening under the hood. Those are worth learning. And you can learn them in a weekend on YouTube.
What she'd focus on instead, if she were starting from scratch: design fundamentals. Typography. Colour theory. User experience. Those come up on every single website, whether or not you ever touch a line of code.
The Rate Calculator That Changed Everything
The biggest financial jump in her business happened in the first two years — the leap from basically free to "I think I can maybe charge $1,000," with, by her own admission, no real logic behind the number. She was so nervous about naming an hourly rate that even $30 an hour felt high to say out loud.
She started watching my content about when it's time to raise your rate, and ran the numbers through my pricing calculator. After her first year in business, that calculator was hard-hitting. It told her that, at her current rate, she was actually losing money.
Maybe I'll lose some clients, she remembers thinking. But it's time.
So she started checking in roughly every three months, reconsidering whether it was time to raise again. The trick that made this feel survivable: an early-client discount. The first handful of people who'd hired her got to keep their original, very cheap rate forever. But every new client who came across her desk got a new number — and she kept raising that number on new inquiries until somebody actually said no.
The Real Red Flag Isn't the Client Who Says No
Here's the part worth sitting with. When she raised her rate and some of the cheap-rate-seeking people said no, she came to see something important: those people have a fundamentally different expectation level to begin with. They were never the clients she actually needed.
Now she charges $100 an hour. Her websites vary, but never for under $3,000 — the highest she's charged is somewhere around $7,000, and she's usually most comfortable around $3,500 to $4,000, which, as she pointed out, isn't even the high end of the market. At that level, she's no longer working with people who have an idea and haven't done any of their own groundwork yet. Her current clients show up with content ready. The $200 clients, by contrast, wanted her to write their content and design their business plan.
I told her about something I'd seen at a live event I hosted recently, where I'd asked attendees to share a website they'd designed along with its price. One person shared a project — a fairly capable beginner designer's work — priced at $200 or $300. It should have been ten times that. And the designer's complaint was the familiar one: even at $200, people say they can't afford it. Which tells you the actual problem: when your price is already rock-bottom, the only people it attracts are the most budget-conscious, price-sensitive buyers there are. Once you clear the four-figure mark, a completely different type of client starts saying yes — the same business owners who were "always saying no" at $300 turn out to be a straightforward yes once you're pricing like you mean it.
Two-Week Builds and a Predictable Retainer Base
For any brand-new build, Paige uses my two-week website structure. Repeat clients and redesigns, though, she treats more organically — she scopes the work, guesstimates the number of days it'll take, and blocks that out on her calendar. Occasionally a project stretches to five weeks, and that's the absolute max; most wrap within a two-week window.
Running quietly in the background are her longer-term development retainer clients, each locked to set days — Mondays, or Mondays and Fridays, depending on the client. That predictability has been huge for the financial side of the business. She's structured things so that those ongoing contracts alone cover every one of her business expenses, before a single new project comes in.
Freelance Life vs. Employee Life: "No Notes"
Ask her to rate the move from employee to business owner, and she doesn't hedge: ten out of ten, no notes. She'll never go back to working for anybody else. She loves designing her own schedule, her own life, and having that much control over both.
There are real downsides. Both she and her husband work for themselves, which means neither of them has employer health insurance — they've gone back and forth for years on whether to pay for it out of pocket. It took a long time to figure out how to pay into a traditional retirement fund without an employer doing it for her. Those pieces get complicated fast when an entire household is self-employed.
But she feels more confident, now, in her own ability to go and earn whatever salary she wants doing this than she ever did chasing a number at a company. And there's a different kind of security in it, too: as an employee, a company can fall apart and hand you two weeks' notice. Running her own business, she'd see trouble coming months in advance. She's not hanging on somebody else's decision-making anymore — she's the one steering.
What a Day Actually Looks Like Now
When she first started, she was rigid about her routine — fully dressed, at her desktop Mac, refusing to leave her seat until the day was officially over. She needed that structure to teach herself how to be self-motivated in the first place.
These days it's the opposite. Every Sunday, she sits down with Asana and maps out her actual week: which clients, what personal commitments are coming up, what she can realistically get done each day. She never books more than two clients into a single day, and usually prefers just one client per day or block. One day a week is set aside purely for the smaller admin and revision tasks that come from every client she's ever built a site for — because once you've worked with someone, she keeps working with them.
Her actual days now flex around how she feels: she works out, walks with her neighbour, and starts whenever she's ready — sometimes 6am, sometimes not until 10am. She often steps away after lunch to spend time in the garden. Outside of work, she's Vermont-based and thoroughly a maker:
→ Gardening
→ Baking
→ Sewing
→ Candle making (a recent addition)
She also travels a lot — she's headed to the Azores next week with her brother and sister for a sibling trip, and she'll log a couple of hours of client work in the morning before either of them wakes up.
Building a Business Around a Dying Parent, Not a Trending Instagram Post
Right as she started this business, COVID hit. Her stepkids were suddenly home from school, not going back for a year and a half — which meant a lot of home-learning fell to her. Then, within a six-month period, her mum got sick and passed away, and her grandmother got sick and passed away. Her sister moved in with her for the duration of the pandemic. On top of all of it, her marriage nearly fell apart.
It's a lot to hit at once. And it recalibrated her.
So much of what we see on the web is about trying to make it to be like the top 1%. That was never actually her goal. Her goal is being able to make a magical Christmas for her kids. She's grateful, she told me, that she took the time — when she knew it was the end with her mum — to actually be present with her, instead of getting sucked so far into work that she couldn't.
That continues today. Both her parents have dealt with serious illness. Her mum has passed. Her dad has MS and is currently in the end stages of it. Being able to step away from her business and spend Fridays with him has been, in her words, a huge relief. Everybody's version of balance is different — but building a business flexible enough to give her those Fridays is what hers needed to look like.
She's honest that it isn't a solved problem. She still, sometimes, puts too much on her plate — and the shift for her has been getting better at noticing how she feels in those moments, then using that feeling to realign her schedule for the following month. It's the same instinct that led her to quit social media for the business early on: she simply noticed something didn't feel right, well before quitting Instagram became a familiar move for anyone else — all while still running one of the more successful businesses among her peers.
Redesigning Her Own Website — On Her Own Terms
She'd wanted to redo the Fluff Creative Studio site for a long time, and held off — she didn't want to be one of those designers who rebrands every two years. By her own admission, she'd gotten to the point of feeling outright cringe looking at her own homepage.
What finally unlocked it wasn't a slow Tuesday. It was figuring out an actual long-term vision for where she wanted the business to go, years out — rather than deciding, as she had been, one year at a time with no bigger picture attached. Once that vision existed, she hired a brand designer, rebuilt the site herself, and genuinely enjoyed doing it.
Was the Course Worth It?
My last question to her: if someone's on the fence about taking the course, was it worth it?
"Oh my gosh, absolutely worth it. 100%." It gave her actionable steps to actually launch, instead of theorising about it. And beyond the steps themselves, she pointed to something I hear from students constantly: the community. Even scattered geographically, watching the videos, reading the blog, and seeing what other students are building makes solo work feel less isolating — the closest thing she has to co-workers, since she doesn't personally know other web designers where she lives.
She mentioned she'd just watched my video on the website layout mistakes that can make your site look like an amateur's — and that even this many years into running her business, it was still directly useful to her. That's the part she says she misses most working alone: having somebody to have those web design discussions with, even just online.
Paige Jones didn't build this business by chasing the loudest version of success available to her. She built it by noticing, over and over, what actually mattered — a rate that didn't lose her money, clients who didn't need her to write their business plan, and Fridays free enough to spend with her dad. If you take one thing from her story, let it be permission to define your own version of "made it," and build toward that instead.
- How Jenna Went from $400 to $6,000 Web Design Projects Using Upwork
- From $500 to $5,000 Projects: How Megan Built a Full-Time Web Design Business
- Do You Need to Learn to Code to Be a Web Designer?
- From $500 to $6K: One Web Designer's Upwork Strategy (and the Referral Line That Changed Everything)
- How to Build a Successful Web Design Business: 30 Honest Truths
