I'm getting a 403 Forbidden error but from what you've all said, it's about telling clients to "pay what they want"?
This is almost never going to work out for the freelancer. The vast majority of potential clients you will run across don't look at your work as a value creation, but something they should dispense with as cheap as possible.
Thinking of spending money as value creation is a fairly rare way of thinking.
Any freelancer who's worked with more than a handful of clients is going to have practically INFINITE stories of clients trying to stiff them, devalue their work, complain about how long it takes, "It's on a computer, can't you just, like, click a button?" etc.
Moreover, freelancing is not just about creating value for the client. It's about meeting their specifications. If the business value they receive is less than your hourly rate, they should have said "No." or not done the project to begin with.
Moreover again, even if the project creates more business value than your hourly rate, and even if the client thinks in terms of value investment instead of costs... they would still need to be understand the amount of work involved in making it happen.
What a mess.
People are probably excited about this idea because they're too scared to price. They'd rather wave their hands and hope the problem goes away.
When you're afraid of something, the thing to do is not run away from it, but educate yourself.
Reading the article, the author especially warns about doing this with anyone and instead suggests trying this technique with long term customers who you trust (and trust you back), find the project to be important for their enterprise (not just a corner of the table site), etc.
The author also gives example stories where he got much less than he expected and whatnot.
Look around the comments for the cache link -- the post is better written than I would have expected and it's not just evangelism.
This is almost never going to work out for the freelancer. The vast majority of potential clients you will run across don't look at your work as a value creation, but something they should dispense with as cheap as possible.
Thinking of spending money as value creation is a fairly rare way of thinking.
Any freelancer who's worked with more than a handful of clients is going to have practically INFINITE stories of clients trying to stiff them, devalue their work, complain about how long it takes, "It's on a computer, can't you just, like, click a button?" etc.
Moreover, freelancing is not just about creating value for the client. It's about meeting their specifications. If the business value they receive is less than your hourly rate, they should have said "No." or not done the project to begin with.
Moreover again, even if the project creates more business value than your hourly rate, and even if the client thinks in terms of value investment instead of costs... they would still need to be understand the amount of work involved in making it happen.
What a mess.
People are probably excited about this idea because they're too scared to price. They'd rather wave their hands and hope the problem goes away.
When you're afraid of something, the thing to do is not run away from it, but educate yourself.