Had a breakthrough with flat fee contracts after 6 years of hourly billing

After a friend in Denver showed me how she structures her estate planning packages with clear deliverables and built-in revision limits, I tried it on my next three client contracts and ended up making $800 more on each one without working extra hours - anyone else had luck moving away from tracking every 6-minute increment?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamesc793h ago

The revision cap is the secret weapon nobody talks about. I started doing a flat $1500 with two rounds of changes on my commercial lease reviews and it stopped the endless back and forth where clients would ask me to tweak tiny things for days. Just make sure you spell out what counts as a revision in the contract, otherwise they'll try to count a full rewrite as one round.

coleman.hannah2h ago

The $1200 for 3 revisions sounds solid, but how do you handle the client who comes back with "one small change" in revision 3 that actually touches like 6 different sections? Do you count that as one revision or break it up? I've seen people get burned when a client reopens the entire rental term discussion under the guise of a single revision.

adam1863h ago

The irony is I spent the first 5 years of my practice absolutely terrified of flat fees (you know, classic imposter syndrome stuff). Then I realized I was basically running a race where every email reply cost me money. Switched to a flat fee model for simple contract reviews last year, flat $1200 for a 3-revision cap, and I made $900 more on three deals that would've taken me forever to nickel-and-dime. Plus my clients seem to like it better, probably because I'm not sending them invoices that look like a grocery receipt.