An underpriced rate never sets off an alarm
Most Thai freelancers set their price properly exactly once — before the first paid job — and then run on that number for years. It usually comes from asking a more experienced friend, scrolling rates in a Facebook group, or dividing an old salary by working days and adding a bit to make quitting feel worth it.
None of those methods is absurd. The problem is that none of them can tell you whether the number actually covers the cost of being self-employed. And an underpriced rate gives no warning. Work keeps coming, clients refer you, the calendar stays full, everything looks like it's working. The symptom shows up in December, when you realise the hardest-working year of your life left you with roughly the same savings as the year before — and that there wasn't a single month where you felt able to say no.
Confidence doesn't fix this. "Just charge more" is useless advice, because what's missing is a reference number, not courage. Real pricing has two layers. The first is your floor rate — the number below which the job loses you money no matter how much you enjoy it. The second is the price you actually quote, which moves up with value, risk and scope. People who price well aren't better guessers. They simply know where their floor is, so declining work underneath it takes two seconds instead of a sleepless night.
Layer one: build a floor rate from four numbers
Your floor rate is not the market rate, not what competitors charge, and not what a client is willing to pay. It's what it costs for you to keep doing this job for another year without going backwards. Four numbers, all of which you can pull from your own records.
1. What you need to keep, per year
Not your dream income — your real personal spending plus the savings you intend to build. Say living costs of ฿30,000 a month, or ฿360,000 a year, plus ฿100,000 into savings and an emergency fund. That's ฿460,000 that has to survive after everything else is paid.
2. Business costs, per year
This is the number people forget, because it leaks out in small amounts all year. Pull it together:
- Software and subscriptions — ฿18,000
- Equipment, amortised over its useful life — ฿25,000
- Internet, travel to clients, co-working — ฿24,000
- Health insurance and Social Security Section 40 contributions — ฿15,000
- Courses, upskilling, conferences — ฿15,000
- Transfer fees, bookkeeping help, invoicing tools — ฿10,000
Around ฿107,000 a year. A photographer and a backend developer will have very different structures here, but almost nobody's business cost is zero.
3. Tax you have to set aside
No HR department is withholding for you, so money landing in your account is not all yours. Thai personal income tax is progressive: the first ฿150,000 of net income is exempt, then 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and upward to 35%, and everyone gets an automatic ฿60,000 personal allowance.
What you actually owe depends on how your income is classified and whether you take the flat or actual expense deduction — a difference that can run into tens of thousands of baht. For floor-rate purposes you don't need precision: reserve roughly 10% of gross and correct it once you know the real figure. Over-reserving is an inconvenience. Under-reserving is a scramble in March.
4. Days you can actually sell
This is the divisor that wrecks most people's maths, because they use 240 or 250 days — a number that has never been true for anyone.
Start at 365. Subtract 104 weekend days, about 15 public holidays, and 15 days of leave and sickness: 231 working days. Now subtract the work nobody pays for — pitching jobs that don't close, writing quotes, answering chat, producing paperwork, chasing payment, bookkeeping, marketing, portfolio updates. That's 30–35% of your time.
You're left with roughly 150 sellable days a year. If you're new and your pipeline is still uneven, use 120.
Putting the floor together
Add the first three numbers, divide by sellable days:
- Must keep: ฿460,000
- Business costs: ฿107,000
- Tax reserve: ~฿33,000
- Required annual revenue: ฿600,000
- ÷ 150 sellable days = ฿4,000 per day, or about ฿500 an hour on an eight-hour day
That ฿4,000 is a floor, not a quote. It's the line below which you're subsidising a client out of your own savings. Just as importantly, it's a number you can defend out loud — not one you invented and then felt sick pressing send on.
Run the calculation with your own figures. A lot of people discover their working rate sits 20–40% below their own floor, which explains the busy-but-broke year perfectly.
Sanity-check it against the market
฿4,000 a day sounds expensive if you mentally compare it to the minimum wage, currently ฿337–400 a day depending on province, with Bangkok and its surrounding provinces at ฿400 since 1 July 2025 — and no increase agreed for 2026.
That comparison is broken from the start. Minimum wage is what an employee receives while an employer carries everything else: the office, the equipment, the employer's social security share, paid leave, and salary during the weeks with no work. A freelancer carries all of it personally.
The honest comparison is total employment cost. A role paying ฿40,000 a month costs a company roughly ฿45,000–50,000 a month once benefits and overhead are counted — ฿540,000 to ฿600,000 a year. Divide by the same 150 sellable days and you land at ฿3,600–4,000 a day. Your floor isn't aggressive. It matches a number employers have always known.
Layer two: the quote is not the floor
The floor answers can I take this? The quote answers what should this cost? The gap between them is your profit. Reasons a price legitimately rises above the floor:
- Urgency. Queue-jumping or weekend work: +25–50%. It genuinely displaces other work and your rest.
- Revision rounds. Two rounds included and unlimited revisions are two different products. If you don't say, the client assumes unlimited.
- Usage rights. One campaign versus a full buyout across every channel can differ by 2× or more.
- Client risk. Multiple decision-makers, no brief, a history of late payment, fuzzy scope — all costs you'll pay later. Price them now.
- Value delivered. A page that lifts sales, or a system that saves the client's team ten hours a month, is not worth the same as production work done to spec.
One reason that should never lower a price: this is easy for me. Your speed is the return on experience you already paid for. Clients buy the outcome, not your suffering.
Match the pricing model to the work
Hourly
Right for genuinely open-ended work: advisory, troubleshooting, discovery. You can't lose money on sprawl. The downside is structural — the better and faster you get, the less you earn.
Fixed project price
Right when the deliverable is well defined. Clients like the certainty and you capture the upside of working efficiently. It only works if scope is written down and a rate for added work is stated in advance. Otherwise the fixed price becomes a ceiling you alone carry.
Monthly retainer
Right for ongoing work — site maintenance, regular content, ads management. Predictable cash flow makes the whole year easier to plan. The trap is drift: cap the hours or deliverables per month, or the retainer quietly becomes a full-time job at part-time pay.
Value-based
Priced against the client's outcome. It pays best and applies least often — you need access to their numbers and a measurable result. Earn two or three documented case studies before you try it.
In practice most established freelancers mix: project pricing for the main work, one or two retainers as a floor of income, and an hourly rate for interruptions and advisory calls.
Costs Thai freelancers leave out of the price
3% withholding tax is not a discount, and you shouldn't inflate your price to offset it — it's prepaid tax you credit back when you file. Two things matter instead. First, collect every withholding certificate (50 Tavi); a missing one is real money lost. Second, cash flow: the deposit is always smaller than the invoice, so plan against the net figure.
The ฿1.8 million VAT threshold. If your revenue is climbing toward it, your pricing needs to anticipate adding 7%. Writing price excludes VAT on quotes today makes that future adjustment routine rather than a surprise.
Fees. Interbank transfers, international payment platforms, FX spread. On overseas clients, fees plus conversion can eat 2–4% of the job. Build it in.
Admin time. If two or three days a month go to quotes, invoices, receipts and chasing, that time is already gone from your divisor. Every day you claw back raises your sellable days — which lowers your floor rate at the same income.
Write the quote so it isn't negotiated down
A single bare number is a target. The client's only moves are accept or ask for less. Offer three tiers instead: a base that solves the core problem, a middle option you actually want to sell, and a complete version. The question in their head shifts from is this too expensive? to which one?
Every quote should carry:
- What's included, written as outcomes rather than activities
- What's not included — image licensing, domains, revisions beyond two rounds
- The rate for added work, per hour or per item
- Payment terms: 30–50% deposit up front, the rest tied to observable milestones
- An expiry date, usually 14–30 days, so last year's price can't come back for you
Signs the price is wrong
- You win nearly everything you quote. A close rate near 100% means you're cheap; healthy sits around 40–60%.
- Clients say yes immediately without a single question.
- The calendar is full and year-end savings barely moved.
- Better work appears and you can't take it, because cheap work fills the month.
- You've started resenting clients who haven't actually done anything wrong. That's usually a pricing symptom, not a people problem.
Raising rates on existing clients
Best timing: contract renewal, the start of a year, or right after delivering a clear result. Give 30–60 days' notice, and never announce it attached to the next invoice.
Go up 10–15% for good existing clients, with a forward-looking reason rather than one that sounds like a complaint. Something like: From January my rate moves to X. For our current work I'll hold the existing rate through February, and the new cycle adds a monthly results summary to the package.
Clients lost over a 10% increase are almost always your least profitable ones, and getting that calendar space back tends to pay for itself. Just don't raise everyone in the same month — stagger it so your cash flow doesn't dip all at once.
The 2026 context
Growth is slow this year, the minimum wage hasn't moved off the ฿337–400 band, and marketing budgets are tighter. What freelancers feel directly is harder negotiation than last year.
The correct response is to cut scope, not price. When a client says the budget is fixed, reduce what you deliver to fit it and hold your unit rate. A discount is very hard to reverse; scope you removed today is something you can sell in the next quarter.
Checklist before you send the next quote
- You know your daily floor rate, and this job clears it
- You divided by sellable days, not working days
- Urgency, revision rounds and usage rights are priced in
- Exclusions and the rate for added work are stated
- Deposit and milestone payments are defined
- Cash-flow planning accounts for 3% withholding, and you'll collect the 50 Tavi
- The quote has an expiry date
What makes this checklist usable is your own history: how many jobs you took last year, at what price, how long each really took, which types were profitable and which quietly lost money. If that history is scattered across chat threads, a spreadsheet and a notebook, calculating a floor rate is just guessing with extra steps.
MANA keeps projects, quotes, invoices and income in one place, so you can answer how many days you actually sold this year, which kind of work pays, and where your floor rate should sit next year.