RateFloor works out what to charge. It does not send the invoice, chase the payment, or tell you what you owe in tax. Those jobs eat billable hours quietly, and the billable hours calculator shows what that costs you. This is what to reach for, and — more usefully — when not to bother.
Do nothing for the first few months
A spreadsheet and a bank account handle a handful of clients perfectly well. Tooling bought before there is a problem to solve becomes another subscription in your business costs, which raises your rate floor for no return. Wait until something breaks.
Invoicing
The first thing to break is usually invoicing, and it breaks as late payment rather than as effort. What matters is not how the invoice looks but whether the tool numbers them consistently, records what was paid and when, and sends a reminder without you having to decide to send it. Chasing money is the least pleasant unbilled work there is, and automating the first two reminders removes most of it.
Bookkeeping and tax
The single highest-value habit is a separate business bank account, and it costs nothing. Reconciling one account is the difference between an hour of admin a month and a lost weekend in January. Software becomes worth it when you need to estimate tax as you go rather than discover it — and the estimate matters because your effective tax rate is a direct input to your rate floor.
Time tracking
Worth doing even on fixed-price work, because it is the only way to know your real billable percentage instead of guessing it. Track for a month, look at the split honestly, and put the actual number into the calculator. Most people find it is lower than they assumed, and that gap is where underpricing hides.
Contracts
A short written agreement covering scope, payment terms, and what happens when the project changes prevents more lost revenue than any tool on this page. Many freelance associations and professional bodies publish free template contracts for their field, and these are usually better starting points than a generic template — they already contain the clauses your industry argues about.
How to decide whether to pay
Price the subscription in billable hours. A tool at $25 a month costs roughly three hours of work a year at a $100 rate. If it saves more than that in admin or recovers one late payment sooner, it pays for itself. If you would struggle to name what it saved, cancel it — it is sitting in your business costs raising your floor.