Tiered pricing: Why you should offer it as a freelancer

Updated Sept 2026

Whether you’re buying undies online, ordering dinner in a restaurant or deciding whether you need Foxtel AND Netflix, it’s a fact that humans generally love a choice. Preferably a few choices.

And your clients are exactly the same.

They like to have options and when they’re looking to hire a freelancer many of them will want to shop around. (Even if that drives us nuts.) And how can you ensure that what you’re offering is a little bit more attractive than what your competitor might be serving up?

Good question. We’ve shared tools about how to calculate your rate, and creating a rate card to send to clients (you can grab our rate card here and our pay rates report here to get you started). But there’s a lot written about tiered pricing and psychological pricing, and the different ways you can price your services to make them more attractive to clients.

Using tiered pricing, you might provide options / packages for clients of varying prices and degrees of value. If you’re putting these packages on a pricing page on your website (which is a whole other post), you might even label your packages things like ‘budget’, ‘most popular’ and ‘premium’, which is said to ease the anxiety of decision making and provide a handy reference point for clients trying to work out what fits with their budget.

How psychological pricing works with clients

I have quite a few clients who aren’t writers and are super time poor running their businesses. However, everyone needs to marketing, everyone wants to bring new customers in the door – and nurture the ones they have.

So, a client might come to me and say, “I need a landing page for my new offer”.

And while I could easily knock that job over, take the money and run, I know that a landing page on their website might draw in some interested people and an initial bump on Google or AI search if it was optimised and the client had decent rankings already… but it could do a lot better – and result in a lot more conversions – if they promoted it to their warm audience via their newsletter and socials.

I have this knowledge and the client probably doesn’t, so I’d explain that yes, a landing page for the offer is a great idea, but to really engage their warm audience (the people most likely to buy), would they like me to write some targeted social posts and a newsletter, or a whole email sequence designed to get people to that new landing page?

You’re not misleading the client by educating them about how to get the most bang for their buck. But you are doing what some call ‘up-selling’ – sharing why, if they opted for those extras, it would help leverage the offer they’re trying to sell even more effectively.

The next words out of that client’s mouth are usually something along the lines of, “Okay… and are you able to do all that too?”

Naturally, I will say yes. Remember, in a lot of cases you know far more than the client does – and so once you learn more about their business goals and pain points, you naturally can suggest ways to help them. Which can mean more $$$ for you.

Tiered pricing and packages

If you do similar things for clients – like, a page of web copy, a regular newsletter, social posts – you can create ‘packages’ or bundles where a client buys a set scope of deliverables.

Typically, you might create a ‘tier’ of different packges which might be in your services guide or on a pricing page on your website.

The first option gives them what they’ve asked for, while the slightly more expensive bundles offers up things they didn’t realise they needed, but now do (and subsequently want). The third, most premium option, is expensive but offers the most value to the client and their business (and specifically addresses those pain points).

So you’re upselling them, yes – but you’re also adding value they need, with each package they have to choose from.

So for example, if you’re bundling deliverables around that landing page copy, your packages might look like this:

• Basic bundle – 1 x landing page copy for specific offer = $800
• Deluxe bundle – 1 x landing page copy for specific offer, 3 x social teasers, newsletter copy to promote the offer = $1300
• Premium bundle – 1 x landing page copy, 3 x social teasers, email sequence = $2000

When you position prices next to each other like this, it can makes something look more or less attractive compared to what’s next to it.

You can also offer to create a custom bundle if a client wants a certain package but extra deliverables on top.

Why tiered pricing works

Going back to the idea that people like choices, you’d hope the client would be tempted to stick around and consider your tiered pricing more than just hiring someone who sent over a quote but didn’t bother to explain that a landing page without promotion is not likely to result in a lot of sales – you need the scaffolding around it to drive people to that page. You’re offering more information, more value and most importantly, a range of choices that show the client you’re sensitive to their budget.

The great thing that can happen from tiered pricing is that once the client has opted for one of your packages and gets used to you writing for them, they don’t want to give it up. So it can often turn into a retainer (and aren’t regular, stable gigs what we all want?).

Do you do tiered pricing or any other psychological pricing tactics with your clients? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.