Embarrassed to Say Your Freelance Rate? The Garden Party Question

2026-10-14

The paper plate is already soft with ketchup when the question arrives.

"So what do you actually charge?"

It's a Saturday afternoon in someone else's garden. A friend's neighbour, holding a lukewarm lemonade, is looking at you with real interest. He runs a small bike-tour company and needs illustrations for a new map. He is not being rude. He is being friendly. That is the problem.

Your mouth opens. Your brain has the number, or a number, or three numbers depending on the day. What comes out is: "Oh, it depends. Usually somewhere around... I mean, I'm flexible. We can talk about it."

He nods kindly. You take a bite of something so you don't have to say anything else.

The sentence you rehearse in the shower

You know this feeling well. It starts in your chest and ends in your ears, a small heat that says don't make this awkward.

In the shower you can say your rate perfectly. Clear, level, almost bored. On the walk to the shop you can say it. In the car you can say it twice.

But the moment a real person with a real budget looks at you, the number turns into an apology. You add "about." You add "roughly." You add a little laugh at the end, as if you're telling a joke the other person should help you finish.

And underneath it sits the quiet question you never say out loud: Who am I to ask for that?

What the apology costs

On the bus home, the garden-party sentence plays again. "I'm flexible."

Nobody asked you to be flexible. They asked what you charge.

Here is what the shrinking voice costs, and it's rarely dramatic. It is a quote that lands a little lower than it should because you braced for "that's a lot." It is a project you take on at a price you resent by the second week. It is a Sunday evening when you're quietly annoyed at a client who has done nothing wrong, except accept the price you offered.

And there's the other cost, the one that doesn't show up anywhere. Each time you mumble your rate, you teach yourself that it's something to be embarrassed about. The next time the question comes, the heat in your ears is a little hotter.

You tell yourself it's modesty. Mostly it's that you aren't sure the number is yours. You picked it from what a former colleague once mentioned, or from what felt not-scary. It has never been built from anything you could point at. So when someone looks at it, even kindly, it wobbles.

The part where nobody was angry

The next week, there's a message from the bike-tour man. He'd like to "get a rough price."

You stare at the box where your reply goes. You type "Happy to!" and delete it. You type a number and delete that too. The cursor blinks like it's waiting for you to be braver.

Then a different thought turns up, small and plain. The embarrassment isn't coming from him. He doesn't know your number is wobbly. He only knows he asked a normal question that every business asks every other business.

The wobble lives entirely on your side. It comes from not knowing where the number came from.

That's the turning point, and it's a quiet one. You don't need to become a more confident person. You need a number that you can stand behind because you know what it's made of: what you need to earn, what time you can really sell, what you'd like to keep for the slow weeks and the days off.

Nobody feels sheepish about a number they understand. They just say it.

An ordinary Monday, later

Picture it a little differently.

It's Monday morning, about half past nine. Coffee is on the desk, still too hot. A new enquiry sits in your inbox from someone you've never met, and the question is the same one: what's your rate?

Your chest doesn't tighten. You open a reply and write two plain sentences with your number in them. No "about." No laugh. No "I'm flexible" in a sentence that didn't ask for it.

You press send and reach for the coffee.

Maybe they say yes. Maybe they say it's above their budget, and you answer calmly that you understand, and that's allowed to be the end of it. Either way you are not carrying the conversation around all day like a stone in your shoe.

By lunch, you've forgotten about it. That's the real gift of a number you trust. It stops taking up room in your head.

Starting with the number itself

If you recognise the garden, the lukewarm lemonade and the little cough of a sentence that comes out in place of your rate, you don't need a pep talk. You need to see where your number comes from, in one calm place, so that it stops feeling like a guess.

That's what we made the Know Your Rate workbook for. It's a free Excel file: you work out your minimum hourly and day rate, and then you have a clean, printable invoice ready for when the work is done, with automatic totals, a tax line and a due date. It organises the numbers; the decisions stay yours, and it doesn't replace a tax professional.

It's pay what you want, including nothing, so there's nothing to be embarrassed about there either.

Find your rate and get the invoice template here

The next time someone at a barbecue asks what you charge, you might just put down the plate and tell them.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.