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If the money conversation makes your stomach drop, this one's for you. After 25 years as a designer, I'm sharing exactly how I price my work — not by the hour, but by the value it creates — and the brave questions to ask before you ever say a number.

Here's what we get into:

• Why you're not bad at money — you're just scared of the conversation
• The phone call that told me I was "hurting the industry" by charging too little
• Why having a baby made me switch from hourly to project-based pricing
• What value-based pricing actually means, and how to explain your worth
• Chris Do's "price the client, not the job" — the exact questions to ask every time
• My real steps: your private floor, one project price, three options, deposits in stages
• Why you should never drop your price (cut the scope instead)
• Design days — the fun, slightly glamorous way to charge
• The one thing nobody teaches us at design school: communication

Prefer to read it? The full written version — every step, laid out — is in the show notes on my site:

Shownotes and all the tools are here.

If it helped, leave a review and subscribe. It's how another designer finds this and feels a little less alone in it.

Want the tools? I'm building the Studio Desk and the Beyond Design membership to take the guesswork out of pricing for good. Get on the waitlist: https://kunshuis.com/membership

I'm Nelett — designer of 25 years, here to show you that freelancing and design isn't difficult. It's small things, done right, consistently.

Support the show

Thanks for listening to BEYOND Design ✨

If this episode spoke to you, here are a few ways to keep the conversation going:

Website & Resources → kunshuis.com
Shop creative tools → The Kunshuis Collective
Show notes & blogs → kunshuis.com/blog

Free support for creatives:

• 21-Day Creative Reset Challenge
• Download: Asking Better Questions (Client Guide)
  
  

🖤 My favourite tools for life + business:

• The Playbook Planner
  — your creative sidekick for focus + flow
• The Playbook Desk
  — a Notion-powered space to run your freelance business with ease

Let’s connect & stay inspired:
📸 Instagram
Join the Beyond Design Room on Facebook

Because design is only 20%… the rest is life.
Thanks for being here, friend. You’re not alone in this journey—let’s design it together.

Send us Fan Mail

I've been in design for more than twenty years, and for most of them I genuinely believed the chaos was just the job. The 4pm "can you quickly change this," the laptop that came on holiday "just in case," the edits I once did on the side of a road while my family waited in the car. It felt normal. Until Covid stopped the world and my body finally exhaled — and I had to ask why it took a global crisis to give me permission to breathe.

This episode is the honest version of why I stepped back from design work. Not because I stopped loving it (I didn't), but because I left the way it was quietly costing me my life — the underpricing, the always-being-available, the freelance guilt that sits on both chairs at once.

If you're a designer or freelancer running on "ek moet net gou," this one's for you. We talk burnout, boundaries, pricing, and why "no" is a whole sentence.

📝 Full show notes, plus everything I couldn't fit in the episode → kunshuis.com

Support the show

Thanks for listening to BEYOND Design ✨

If this episode spoke to you, here are a few ways to keep the conversation going:

Website & Resources → kunshuis.com
Shop creative tools → The Kunshuis Collective
Show notes & blogs → kunshuis.com/blog

Free support for creatives:

• 21-Day Creative Reset Challenge
• Download: Asking Better Questions (Client Guide)
  
  

🖤 My favourite tools for life + business:

• The Playbook Planner
  — your creative sidekick for focus + flow
• The Playbook Desk
  — a Notion-powered space to run your freelance business with ease

Let’s connect & stay inspired:
📸 Instagram
Join the Beyond Design Room on Facebook

Because design is only 20%… the rest is life.
Thanks for being here, friend. You’re not alone in this journey—let’s design it together.

Send us Fan Mail

Nobody talks about the real loneliness of freelancing. Not the Pinterest version — laptop, coffee, living the dream. The real version. Where you read the same client email five times and wonder if you're being difficult, or if you should just drop your price because shame, you need the work.

In this episode, I want to talk about something most designers carry quietly: the weight of doing everything alone. The pricing decisions, the client conversations, the small wins nobody celebrates with you, and the hard days nobody sees.

Because here's the truth — you can be talented and still need people. You can run your own business and still need someone to say, "Breathe. You're not crazy. This is normal."

We talk about why community matters more than information right now, what real creative support actually looks like (hint: it's not 284 unread messages in a WhatsApp group), and why independence has been made to look a little too glamorous in the freelance world.

This one is honest. It's real. And if you've been feeling lonely in your creative business lately, I think you need to hear it.

👉 Read the full show notes and find the links mentioned in this episode here.

Support the show

Thanks for listening to BEYOND Design ✨

If this episode spoke to you, here are a few ways to keep the conversation going:

Website & Resources → kunshuis.com
Shop creative tools → The Kunshuis Collective
Show notes & blogs → kunshuis.com/blog

Free support for creatives:

• 21-Day Creative Reset Challenge
• Download: Asking Better Questions (Client Guide)
  
  

🖤 My favourite tools for life + business:

• The Playbook Planner
  — your creative sidekick for focus + flow
• The Playbook Desk
  — a Notion-powered space to run your freelance business with ease

Let’s connect & stay inspired:
📸 Instagram
Join the Beyond Design Room on Facebook

Because design is only 20%… the rest is life.
Thanks for being here, friend. You’re not alone in this journey—let’s design it together.