Do you lie about how long a task took you as a freelancer?

Don't charge for your time if you can negotiate a better arrangement. Instead attach prices to specific deliverables. Ideally the prices have some relationship to the business value.

You should focus on adding business value and how to attach fair prices for delivering that value, in concrete terms. Hours spent at a keyboard, or lines of code, do not describe anything of value to a business.

You can ask the customer to attach a value to deliverables and then decide if you can profitably deliver. Structuring projects to support that means you and the customer have to break the tasks down into well-defined steps with clear deliverables, something freelancers should do in any case. It also means getting the customer to think about business value. You should also consider cost over time (i.e. is the customer losing money because of a bug or missing requirement), and risk to the business.

Freelancers too often either accept a price the customer attaches to a project (based on what?), or guess at the time required and multiply by the desired rate. No one specifies the project in detailed steps with clear deliverables and a definition of "done" for each stage. As a result the freelancer and the customer will conflict over schedule and budget, usually well into the project.

For skilled freelancers with a solid reputations "a few hundred of dollars per hour" doesn't describe a "crazy rate."

Don’t change the deal after the fact; next time figure this out upfront and sell the task for value (fixed price) instead of hours and don’t mention the time you will spend. Practice in front of a mirror to look like things are going to be pretty rough for this task and say things like ‘clearing your agenda’ etc even though you know it’s going to take you only a few hours. After they sign, they signed for value, not hours, so you don’t owe them any explanation why they paid 20k for 2 days work. I personally, if it’s not urgent (urgent has a cost multiplier!), wait 3 weeks before starting so they won’t ask that question anyway.

I round down because dishonesty hurts me more than them.

Most of the time, my clients ask me to pad my hours, to charge for things like driving to a meeting or times that I'm just reading a book, stuck on a project.

There's the clients who will try to take advantage of you and there's the ones who love being generous. If you're generous with people you work with, you end up working with the people who would be generous to you.

10 years ago, a task could've taken me an hour. Since I was learning, I probably charged $15 an hour to do it.

Today, that same task might take me 5 minutes to do and I'll charge $50 to do it.

Why? 10 years ago I was learning how to do it. Today, I know how to do it ;)

I could spend time watching a YouTube video for how to install a bathroom sink. It would probably take me 2 to 5 hours to complete the task. However, I have a handyman who I hire and it takes him about an hour to do it and he might charge me $150 for the installation. 2 to 5 hours and I might do it wrong. Or $150 for my guy to do it in about an hour?

You pay for the professionalism and the expertise.

I wouldn't charge less because you did it quicker, when on the other hand you would probably not charge more if something took you longer because you had to fix a bug or something with a library you are using. I think if they get what they need all is good.

If a client saves 4 times what you charged, then that isn't too crazy. You should capture ALL of the value right?

And some companies like Google capture that kind of ratio from all of their employees!

I bill based on the value of the deliverable. Billing by the hour just sets you up for conflict and micromanagement. Bill for what you deliver. If it takes you forever, that is on you. If you get it done in no time, you get good money for having the skills to deliver.

As a freelancer, you want your clients to recoup their investment in you many times over. Generally, 4x is the very minimum you should aim for, give the friction and effort in hiring you in the first place.

So I don't think you should've charged more in this instance.

It's only a small job, charge what was agreed and hope that by demonstrating value and service they come back at some point for more larger ones.

Do this enough times and after a while you will have a steady stream of work from customers that you can work with on the basis of trust.

PS : You say "your code saved them 4 times...", but sounds like it was their idea, so they could have got anyone to do it. Remember that, you should be grateful for the work.

most of the mid tier freelancers I know inflate the hours they worked on paper... I Its immoral no question, yet the client is happy with a lower hourly rate and value is still created on both ends.

This is my domain - I run a website for freelancers to share their hourly and project level earnings, kinda like a levels.fyi or a glassdoor but for freelancers.

In my experience collecting this kind of information, it is actually in the interest of freelancers to charge hourly. Far too often, with project level quotes, there is a scope increase, and in the end, the hourly rate is way less than your actual hourly rate. Not always, but very, very common. It only is in your favor if the project itself is actually very simple, you know it will for sure take you x amount of hours.

I wouldn't lie about how much time you spent doing something, either. But there is some nuance there. It's not like you can work for 2 hours and then bill for 8. But if you work for 10 minutes, you can bill for the hour. If you work for 2 hours 10 minutes, you can bill for 3. This is what I tell people working for me, but YMMV.

a few $100 dollars per hour is nothing

one time i wanted to hire a lawyer. his rate was $1500 per hour and his partner’s $2000 per hour.

again, we are so far off as engineers and we are clueless regarding negotiation and deal making.