I'd promised to build a full email marketing automation system for an ecommerce store.
Two weeks. $3 an hour. $240 total.
In Stockholm, where I live, that's less than a local bus fare (per hour).
And I worked my ass off to deliver on time.
Why I priced at $3/hour
I wasn't desperate. I was making a calculated trade.
I'd built email automation systems for SaaS clients before — but ecommerce was a different world with different tools.
Klaviyo, the software most ecom stores run on, was new to me. And without Klaviyo experience on my profile, nobody was going to take a chance on me.
So I pitched the lowest rate Upwork would allow.
Not because I thought that's what my work was worth. Because I knew exactly what I was buying: entry into a new niche, hands-on Klaviyo experience, and a live project I could talk about on future calls.
The $240 was never the point.
What went wrong
At first, things were great.
They seemed like genuinely nice people. We had video calls. We bonded over our dogs. We saw things eye to eye.
When I delivered on time, I thought they'd be thrilled.
They were — mostly. They loved the automations. They liked the copy. But the design felt unfinished to them.
"Maybe you should team up with a designer," they told me.
My design was basic. Partly because I'm not a designer. But partly because their competitors had all gone overboard with cutesy, colorful templates — and I'd deliberately gone minimal to help them stand out as a small store with a personal feel.
But they wanted to look like everyone else.
So I offered to install a design template if they'd just pick one they liked.
Silence. For months.
Then they came and asked for their $240 back.
Who actually won
That stung. We really needed the money at the time — even if it was never the main reason I took the job.
And I felt like I'd delivered thousands of dollars worth of work for $240.
But expectations are a bitch. And sometimes people don't know how good a deal they've gotten.
They burned the relationship over a design template that would have cost them far less than the refund.
But here's what I walked away with instead: full Klaviyo experience I could put on my profile. A complete automation system I could describe in detail on future calls. Proof I could deliver in a new niche. And the confidence to price properly next time.
That experience directly led to my next ecom client paying me $2,200 for the exact same automation system.
He got $240. I got the foundation for everything that followed.
The lesson
Underpricing isn't always wrong.
But underpricing without knowing what you're taking instead of the money is how you get burned without getting anything in return.
If you're going to work cheap, be deliberate about it.
Know exactly what you're buying — experience, a case study, a testimonial, a skill, a niche entry point. And make sure that thing compounds into something worth more than the money you left on the table.
Deliberate underpricing is an investment. Random underpricing is just working for free.
He thought he won. He had no idea.
Low prices attract low-value clients. That part is true.
But sometimes a low-value client hands you something a high-value client never would — the chance to learn, fail, and build proof in a low-stakes environment.
The client who disputed my payment thought he got the better end of the deal.
He got $240 back from someone who couldn't afford a bad review so early in the game.
What he didn't know was that the experience he handed back along with that refund went on to earn me nearly ten times that amount from the next client.
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