Freelancers and contractors should keep pricing their work based on the value delivered to the client, not on time spent or effort, exactly as they always should have — AI just makes it more obvious that hours worked is the wrong metric.
Wes argues pricing should be based on value delivered rather than hours or effort, a principle he says predates AI and still holds even as AI slashes the time tasks take. ✦ AI generated
Wes Bos · Syntax · 2026-07-08 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 23:41
“As AI enables developers to build features in minutes that previously took hours or days, how should contractors and freelancers price their work fairly? By time spent, estimated effort, or value delivered?”
It's all about the value delivered and if you spend a whole bunch of your time learning something, building out a bunch of tools, creating, I don't know, an army of agents that is so special that nobody else can do it as well or as fast as you, that shouldn't be factored into how long it takes you — you should be billing based on how much value delivered to the client at the end of the day.
verbatim transcript · starts at 23:41
23:41value delivered and if you spend a whole bunch of your time learning something, building out a bunch of tools, creating, I don't know, an army of agents that is so special that nobody else can do it as well or as fast as you, that shouldn't be uh factored into how how long it takes you to you just you should be billing based on how much value delivered to the
24:04client at the end of the day. Um Certainly like these things are going to change. Um like people aren't going to be paying you $600 to like refactor a like a one page on their website anymore when like I think like what people are willing to pay for and how much you get paid for doing stuff is is going to be or is already changing, right? But that that that
24:30doesn't make make it that you should be charging based on your thing. Maybe tokens. >> [laughter] >> You know, like at what point does your bill include how many tokens you spent on something cuz now people are saying like you're not talking about how much time you spent, but you're like, "Oh man, I spent $6,000 worth of tokens." >> money to develop now, yeah. Yeah. >> Weird world.
24:52Emil Aven says, "Hey folks, do you have any idea why WebKit box-reflect and such a useful and delightful property for easy CSS reflections doesn't get standardized nor Firefox implements it with a vendor prefix and this goes on for decades at this point. Yeah, so WebKit box-reflect was something that was added in Safari to basically get the like glossy floor effect where you could like mirror an image below. Um and it was never it
25:24never went through a standardization process. It was just added to Safari. Very likely a lot of weird stuff gets added to Safari because they need it internally or they're they're like they have some weird screen in iTunes that needs uh that is actually built with HTML and CSS and they need to be able to replicate that effect. Why was it never added to any of the browsers? I think