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Freelance revision cost calculator

Unbilled revision rounds are where freelance profit quietly leaks away. Plug in your numbers to see what scope creep really costs you each year, then see how to stop it.

Your numbers
Project profile
$
4
3
2h
50%

The portion you absorb instead of billing — scope creep.

You're losing roughly
$10,800
per year in unbilled revision work
Billed work
$90K
Unbilled leak
$11K
144
Hours / year
18
Work days lost
$900
Per month
That's 18 full work days a year spent on revisions nobody paid for. Tightening approvals could win most of it back.
Stop the leak
The real cost

Why unbilled revisions cost more than you think

A single “quick change” rarely feels expensive in the moment. But across every project, every month, those rounds add up. And because they happen after the price was agreed, they come straight out of your effective hourly rate. A designer at $75/hour doing three two-hour revision rounds across four projects a month, absorbing half of them, is quietly giving away thousands of dollars a year.

The fix isn't charging for every email. It's having a clear line between “feedback on this version” and “a new request.” That line is an explicit approval. Collect the feedback and resolve it, then have the client formally sign off on a specific version. Anything after that is documented, billable scope.

Questions

Good to know

How does the revision cost calculator work?
It multiplies your average revision rounds per project by the hours each round takes and the number of projects you run per month to get your monthly revision hours. Then it applies the share you don't bill for (scope creep) and your hourly rate to estimate what unbilled revisions cost you per month and per year.
What counts as an 'unbilled' revision?
Any revision time you absorb instead of charging for. These are the extra rounds beyond what the project was scoped and priced for. When a client says 'just one more tweak' after sign-off and you do it for free, that's unbilled revision time, and it's where most freelance scope creep hides.
How do I actually reduce this number?
Get an explicit, version-specific approval before you consider a phase done, and keep the record. With a clear sign-off tied to the exact version reviewed, a later request is easy to classify as new, billable scope instead of an unresolved comment. That way you can quote it rather than absorb it.

Related

All free toolsDesign feedback for freelancersThe client design approval process
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