Loomrate Freelance Pricing FAQ

Your true take-home hourly rate is the net income you actually pocket per hour after subtracting taxes, expenses, and platform fees (like Upwork or Fiverr commissions), divided by the total hours worked (including unpaid overhead/non-billable hours like revisions, calls, and email administration).

Many freelancers charge a gross rate (e.g. $50/hr) but fail to realize their net rate is closer to $25/hr once expenses and unpaid hours are factored in. You can determine your true rate instantly with our freelance hourly rate calculator to price profitably.

We take your gross Project Fee and subtract direct project expenses, platform commission fees, and allocated monthly overhead costs. This gives your Gross Profit. We then subtract self-employment income taxes to find your Net Take-Home Pay. Finally, we divide this net pay by your total hours worked (both billable hours and unpaid non-billable hours) to determine your True hourly rate. You can run these calculations for your own projects using our freelancer rate calculator.

Non-billable hours are hours you work on your business that you cannot invoice directly to a client. This includes writing emails, client onboarding, status meetings, admin tasks, accounting, and revision loops. If a project requires 40 hours of billable coding and 10 hours of email correspondence and status meetings, your true effort is 50 hours. Factor this in to prevent underpricing. You can track unpaid hours using the non-billable inputs in our project quote calculator.

Loomrate supports built-in calculations for major freelance platforms (Upwork, Fiverr) as well as custom percentages. For taxes, you input your average expected tax bracket or self-employment tax reserve percentage, and we automatically set aside that reserve from your gross profit before calculating your net take-home pay.

Scope creep occurs when the actual effort or hours required to complete a project exceed the initial estimated billable hours without a corresponding increase in fee. Loomrate compares your estimated hours to your actual hours worked, calculates the effective value of that lost time, and displays a "Scope Creep Cost" representing your lost billing potential. Use our freelance pricing calculator to audit your active contracts for scope creep. See the full definition in our pricing glossary.

Yes. Loomrate is built with a local-first philosophy. If you use the app as a guest, 100% of your inputs, calculations, and saved projects remain stored directly in your browser's local database (localStorage) and are never sent to any servers. If you choose to sign up for an account, your data is securely encrypted and synced to our secure database so you can access it across devices.