I Got a Real Project. Then I Had to Price Myself.

The Favour Economy

"It's a small thing. Can you just..."

That's how it always starts. A spreadsheet that won't add up right. A report that takes someone three days to make. An email you have to copy paste into Word and reformat so it doesn't look broken. It breaks anyway.

For months this was my life. Not a side hustle. I refuse to call it that, it sounds too strategic. It was favours. Helping people with their work. Friends of friends. Someone's aunt's business. The kind of work where the payment is lunch and the deadline is "whenever you get a chance."

And I loved it. Not the lunch. Well, the lunch. The feeling of opening a file that had been torturing someone for years and going "wait, why are you doing this manually?"

That question is the most dangerous question in the world. It's the question that turns a favour into a career.

Everyone Is Running on Duct Tape

Here's what I learned doing all those favours. Every single company, no matter how much money it pulls in, is running its whole operation on spreadsheets held together with hope and prayer.

I wrote about this in Stop Calling That Excel File a Database. The version numbers. The shared drive. The one person whose whole job is reconciling files that should never have been separate in the first place.

But knowing it and living it are different things.

Living it is sitting in a meeting where they show you the "system" and it's fourteen workbooks connected by VLOOKUPs that somebody's cousin built in 2019 and nobody has touched since because they're scared it'll break. Living it is watching a grown adult copy numbers from one file to another by hand because "that's how we've always done it." Living it is realising the one person who "knows Excel" at that company is basically the oracle, and the whole business prays to them every month end.

And every time, the fix was the same. A database. A script. A pipeline. One afternoon of my life and their workflow went from "three days of copy pasting" to "one button."

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For someone to say "okay that's cute, but can you do it for real?"

Then someone did.

The Question That Changed Everything

Not "can you help us?" I'd heard that a hundred times.

"We want to replace the spreadsheets. Properly. A real system. Can you build it?"

...Can I build it?

I looked at my tools. A pile of Python scripts. A database. A vim config with more hours logged than most people's gym memberships. A browser history that suggests I've been googling "how to be a real developer" for the last three years. And I said the thing you're not supposed to say:

"Let me put together a proposal."

The Price

Here's what I didn't expect. It wasn't the building that scared me. It was the number.

Weeks. I spent weeks trying to figure out what to charge. Not because I'm bad with money. Because there was no reference point. No salary band. No recruiter to blame. Just me, a blank document, and the question nobody ever teaches you to answer: what am I worth?

Every number I wrote down felt wrong. Too high and I'm a joke, they'll laugh and find someone else. Too low and I'm the spreadsheet guy again, the favour economy with extra steps. I went back and forth so many times my notes started arguing with themselves. The document history could tell you exactly when I gave up each time.

And then I did the thing I should've done on day one. I stopped asking what I was worth and asked what the alternative costs.

If they hired a proper software company to build a custom solution, what would that set them back? A lot. A number that made me choke on my tea. But that's the real market price of the thing they're asking for. The hours, the meetings, the overhead, the profit margin. That's the baseline.

And what had I already delivered? A hundred favours. Systems that replaced weeks of manual work. Reports that took three days now take one click. That's not a hobby. That's a track record of doing exactly this, just without the invoice.

So the question stopped being "am I worth it?" and became "why would I charge less than the alternative?"

I wrote the number. It was bigger than anything I'd ever charged. I panicked. I rewrote it three times. I panicked some more. And I sent it anyway.

It's with the client now. Not signed. Waiting. And honestly? The waiting is worse than the pricing. Because now the number is out there and I can't unsend it.

What Knowing Your Worth Actually Means

In the Know Your Worth series I talked about desperation, predatory recruiters, and contract clauses designed to screw you. But here's the thing I didn't fully get until now.

Knowing your worth isn't just about saying no to bad offers. It's about saying yes to the scary ones.

The doubt isn't proof that you're not ready. It's proof that you care. The charlatans don't have imposter syndrome. The people who fake it don't lie awake wondering if they can do the job. They don't think about the job at all. They just collect the cheque.

If you're doubting whether you can build it, you're already more qualified than the guy who's certain he can. Because you've actually looked at the problem. You've seen the spreadsheets. You've felt the weight of what you're promising.

Here's what got me through the weeks of pricing:

1. I'd done the work already. A hundred favours, each one a miniature version of this project. The only difference was scale and money.
2. Nobody else was going to do it. Not the software company, too expensive, too slow, too corporate. Not the internal team, they don't exist, that's the problem. The spreadsheet oracle? She's the one I'm replacing.
3. The worst case wasn't that bad. I couldn't think of a scenario where I sent the number, it didn't work, and the world ended. Embarrassing? Yes. Terminal? No.

And one more. I wrote the proposal myself. I got to define what success looked like, and what it cost. That's not a burden. That's power.

The Proposal Is a Mirror

Let me be honest about the scariest part of the whole thing, because nobody talks about it. Writing your own terms.

Know Your Worth Part 2 is about spotting bad deals. Predatory clauses. "Competitive" salaries. The rush jobs. And here's the thing nobody tells you until you're on the other side of the table.

You become the employer.

When you write the proposal, you're the one who sets the scope. You decide what's in and what's out. You decide what happens when the client asks for "one more little thing" for the 47th time. You learn the same lesson I railed against from the other side. The document is a script, and this time you wrote it.

And that's where the real doubt lives. Not "can I write the code" but "can I hold the line?" Can I say no to scope creep? Can I charge for the work I actually do? Can I be the one setting the terms instead of the one accepting them?

The answer, I'm still learning, is only if you believe you're worth it. And I did. Barely. Some days I still don't.

But here's the difference between now and six months ago. I negotiated from a position of having built the thing. Every favour, every spreadsheet, every report. That's not a hobby I'm ashamed of. That's the portfolio. That's the proof.

What Actually Changed

People ask what it's like moving from side projects to "real projects" and I never know how to answer, because the work is the same. Data in. System out. The difference is everything around the work.

Deadlines are real. A favour's deadline is a suggestion. A project's deadline is a date someone else has planned their life around.

Money is real. Not lunch. Actual money, written in a document with my name on it. And with it comes the terrifying realisation that you now have to earn it back. Not by working harder. By being worth it.

The client is real. Not "someone's aunt." A business that will use this thing every single day. Their livelihood is partially in my hands now. That's heavy. It's also the most motivating thing I've ever felt.

The doubt is real. But so is the fact that I did it anyway.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

The spreadsheet guy is still in here. Some days I open a workbook and the old reflex kicks in. Let me just fix this one formula, this one file, this one favour. It's comfortable. It's safe. Nobody expects anything.

But comfort is not the same as safety. The favours were keeping me small. Every "I'll just help out" was another way of saying "I'm not ready to charge for what I'm worth." And what I've learned, what the Know Your Worth series was circling the whole time, is that the first person you have to convince of your worth is yourself.

The number I finally sent is proof. Not that they'll accept it, that's still up in the air. But that I believe it. That I did the maths, looked at my own work, compared it to what a custom solution actually costs, and wrote down what I was worth without flinching.

The real proof is that I stopped hiding behind favours.

The next time someone asks "can you just fix this spreadsheet?" I'll do what I've always done. I'll fix it. But this time I'll invoice them. And then offer to build them the system that fixes it forever.

P.S. If you're reading this from the spreadsheet era, the step between favour and project isn't skill. It's saying yes to the thing that scares you. And if you need a reminder of what happens when you don't know your worth, Part 1 is still there. Then go put a number on yourself. It's going to feel too big. Send it anyway.