Can Developers Earn $300/hr WITHOUT Tracking Hours?

If you’re a developer, yes—you can earn $300/hr without tracking hours. The way it works is you stop tying your income to time, and you start tying it to business outcomes. Instead of billing hourly, you price a fixed offer as a percentage of the money you help a company make or save, and then you use your own internal “effective hourly rate” to decide whether the opportunity is worth it. Read on for all the details.

Ever get the feeling companies care more about you getting work done as fast as possible than that you even do good work in the first place? You’re not crazy. And the real problem is bigger than just feeling rushed. Making truly lifechanging income is pretty unlikely if everything you do is tied to the hours you work. But there is a way to work with companies without tracking time—and once you see it, you’ll understand a completely different way to make money in tech.

Can developers earn $300/hr without tracking hours?

Yes—if you price your work based on the size of an opportunity (money made or saved) instead of the number of hours you work, you can hit $300/hr (or more) without billing hourly or reporting time.

When you work this way, you can cut your hours or keep a 40-hour week and make more money. The big difference is that top consultants aren’t getting paid “for being smart” or “for having skills.” They’re getting paid because they enable a business opportunity that’s worth real money.

After coaching over 140 developers, I was genuinely surprised by something: not a single person I coached had heard about this before working with me. Most of us were trained to think the only options are salary, raises, promotions, or maybe contracting by the hour. But premium consulting is a different lane entirely—and it starts with understanding how companies see a consultant differently than an employee.

This distinction is one of the foundational mindset shifts we work through inside the Consulting Offer Workshop.

Why does hourly work make lifechanging income so unlikely?

Because when everything is tied to hours, your income is capped—and companies will always push for speed, not outcomes, because speed is the only lever they can pull inside an hourly model.

If your pay is connected to time, then more money usually means more hours, more stress, more context switching, or a promotion into work you may not even want. It also means your value gets measured in the wrong unit. When the unit is hours, the conversation becomes: “How fast can you get it done?” not “How valuable is this when it’s done?”

That’s why so many developers feel rushed. It’s not just the deadlines. It’s the system. The system is designed to squeeze output out of a fixed cost (salary) or a predictable rate (hourly). And if that’s the only game you’re playing, then truly outsized income is hard to reach—because your time is the limiter.

Inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, I help you step out of employee thinking so you’re no longer trapped inside that hourly ceiling.

How do companies evaluate consultants differently than employees?

They evaluate employees through technical credibility, but they evaluate consultants through business value—and that single difference changes everything about how you get paid.

You’ve probably had to pass technical interviews to get hired before. When that happens, the person evaluating you is almost always another engineer. You’re proving you can do the work. You’re proving you’re competent.

But when you sell a premium consulting offer, the buyer is a business person. You’re not proving that you know how to do something. You’re proving that you understand how much what you do is worth to the company.

That’s why this isn’t just “freelancing with nicer packaging.” It’s a different kind of sale. The person on the other side cares about outcomes, urgency, risk, opportunity cost, revenue, margin, and time-to-value. They don’t want a list of tasks. They want a result they can point to.

That’s the core skill: translating what you already know how to do into something a business person recognizes as an opportunity worth paying for. And yes—this is teachable, even if you’ve never thought this way before. We practice that translation directly in the Consulting Offer Workshop.

What are the only two things tech work really does for a business?

At the highest level, everything we do in tech either makes a company money or saves a company money—and pricing gets simple when you start thinking in those terms.

When you boil it down, everything we do in tech jobs really only does two things for a business. You’re either making them more money or you’re saving them money.

Now, that doesn’t mean every task you do will feel like revenue or cost reduction. A lot of it feels like “just engineering.” But businesses don’t fund engineering because it’s interesting—they fund it because it creates leverage.

Here’s the thing that totally changes the game in how you can get paid in tech: you don’t charge an hourly rate. You charge a percentage of the money you’re making or saving for them.

That’s the key to making way more income than any salary can pay you.

This “two buckets” framing is also how we help developers map their experience to business value in the Consulting Offer Workshop.

What is value-based pricing for developers?

Value-based pricing is when you price your offer based on the financial impact of the outcome you enable—then you charge a fixed amount (often a percentage of the opportunity), instead of billing hourly.

What I’ve just described is also known as value-based pricing. It shows you exactly how much your consulting offer is worth at a specific company.

This is a big identity shift for developers, because most of us were trained to think: “I get paid for my skills,” or “I get paid for my output,” or “I get paid for my time.” Value-based pricing says: you get paid because you enable an outcome that’s valuable.

And to price this correctly, you need a way to estimate value without pretending you can predict the future perfectly. That’s where the next concept comes in.

Value-based pricing is the pricing backbone I teach inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, because it’s the difference between “just freelancing” and building a premium, repeatable offer.

What is the value realization model, and why does it matter?

The value realization model is simply how a company will actually receive the money from an opportunity—either as a one-time event or recurring over time—and your pricing depends on which one it is.

When business people see the chance to make or save money, they call it an opportunity. Once you understand the size of the opportunity, you have an idea of how much money you can make as a premium technical consultant. The bigger the opportunity, the more you get paid.

But before you start asking for your cut, you have to understand how the money comes in.

There are two ways a company can realize the value of an opportunity. I call this the value realization model.

Think about software products. Sometimes you pay $300 upfront for a lifetime license. The company makes money once. That’s one-time value realization.

Other times you pay $20 per month. The company makes money every month you keep using it. That’s recurring value realization.

This concept doesn’t just apply to products. You’ve been helping companies realize value all over your career—you probably just haven’t noticed it yet.

In the Consulting Offer Workshop, we use this model to help you stop guessing and start pricing with a clear logic a buyer can understand.

How do I price a consulting offer when the value is one-time?

You price one-time value by identifying the size of the one-time opportunity and charging a reasonable percentage of it—without ever offering an hourly estimate as the basis for the price.

Let’s talk about growth first, because it’s the most obvious form of value. There are many ways companies grow:

• They get more customers.
• They charge more per customer.
• They expand into a new market.
• They launch a new product or service.

Now here’s an example of one-time value realization.

Say you find a company (call it Company A) selling an expensive enterprise software product. They have a big new customer (Company B) they want to close. If Company B buys, they roll it out across the company. Maybe that opportunity is worth $800,000 to Company A.

But once Company B buys it, that’s it. No future revenue from that specific sale. It’s a one-time event: they make the sale, get paid, and it’s done.

Now imagine your consulting offer is what unlocks that deal. Without your work, they can’t make the $800,000.

So you choose a percentage. There’s wiggle room depending on the situation, but let’s keep it simple and say 5%.

5% of $800,000 is $40,000. That’s your price.

You can collect it up front or split it into payments, but the important point is this: you never give them an hourly estimate or sell your services at an hourly rate. You’re not getting paid for your skills. You’re getting paid to enable an opportunity.

We build offers around this exact kind of clear, outcome-based logic inside the Consulting Offer Workshop.

How do I price a consulting offer when the value is recurring?

You price recurring value by estimating the monthly impact and multiplying it across a reasonable time window the business already believes in—then charging your percentage against that total.

Here’s a recurring growth example.

Let’s say a company sells their product in the United States and wants to expand to Europe, but they need your offer to make it possible. Customers pay $200 per month, and the company already has hundreds of customers.

They believe that once they can sell in Europe, they’ll get 25 new customers in the first month.

25 customers × $200/month = $5,000 in new monthly revenue.

But the key is: once they can sell in Europe, customers keep coming in. This isn’t a one-time sale. It’s ongoing. And in many businesses, recurring value doesn’t just repeat—it compounds.

You don’t need to predict the future perfectly. You just need a reasonable window of time the business already believes in.

So say the business believes this expansion will generate that increase over the next 2 years.

That’s 24 months × $5,000/month ≈ $120,000 of new revenue over that window.

Now you price your cut against the total opportunity. If you charge 10%, your consulting offer would cost $12,000.

This recurring-value math is one of the cleanest ways to justify premium pricing without feeling weird about it—and it’s a core exercise in the Consulting Offer Workshop.

Is saving companies money usually one-time or recurring?

In practice, meaningful cost reduction is almost always recurring—and that recurring nature is where your leverage comes from.

The other way you can get paid based on the size of the opportunity is by saving companies money.

This is where a company is already spending money doing something, but your consulting offer reduces it.

And here’s something important: when it comes to cost reduction with technology, meaningful cost reduction is almost always recurring.

That’s not a technicality. It’s where your leverage comes from.

When you lower infrastructure costs, reduce support load, eliminate manual work, or improve efficiency, those savings show up month after month. Which means cost reduction usually falls under recurring value realization, not one-time.

This is why “efficiency work” can be incredibly valuable when you frame it correctly, and it’s one of the four business value lanes we teach developers to recognize in the Consulting Offer Workshop.

What does a $300/hr consulting offer look like in a cost reduction example?

It looks like pricing your percentage of recurring savings, then using your internal effective bill rate to confirm the work can be delivered efficiently—without billing the client hourly.

Imagine a company is spending $100,000 per month on cloud infrastructure. Over time, their systems become a mess: unused services, oversized instances, inefficient workloads.

You come in as a consultant and perform an infrastructure optimization. You consolidate services, rightsize resources, and clean up what’s no longer needed.

When the work is done, their monthly cost drops from $100,000 to $80,000.

That’s a $20,000 per month reduction.

Even though you did the work once, they benefit every month.

Now you pick a time window again. Ask them: how long do you believe this infrastructure will be in place?

Say they say 2 years.

24 months × $20,000/month = $480,000 in savings over that window.

If you charge 10%, your price is $48,000.

Now notice what’s happening: you did not bill $48,000 because you “worked a lot of hours.” You priced it because that’s what the outcome is worth.

That pricing muscle—tying technical work to measurable business impact—is exactly what we develop in the Consulting Offer Workshop.

If I’m not billing hourly, how do I know I’m actually earning $300/hr?

You calculate your effective bill rate by dividing the fixed price by the hours it takes you to deliver—and you use that number to decide whether an opportunity is worth your time.

This is the final piece of the puzzle.

Remember how I said you could make $300 per hour? The question becomes: how long will it take you to get this done?

And I know what you’re thinking: “Wait… do I need estimates?”

Here’s the thing: you still do, but it’s a less stressful way of going about it.

When you estimate work as an employee, you’re doing different tasks every week on a project. Since you’ve never done it before, a lot of estimating is honestly just guessing. That’s why it’s stressful—and why companies can get obsessive about how close you are to your estimate.

But when you become a premium consultant, you don’t want to do lots of different things for clients.

Instead, you want to help companies make or save money the same way—or as close to the same—as you can.

That reduces variables, which gives you a predictable idea of how long it takes.

Companies still want a sense of timeline, but you don’t report your hours each week. You’re a business. You provide a contract with your terms, and you choose how you’ll show progress.

Here’s a simple example.

Say you’ve determined (based on value) that your price is $10,000.

If you can get it done in 33 hours or less, that’s at least $300 per hour.

That’s your effective bill rate. It’s not what you bill your client. It’s a number you use internally to evaluate opportunities.

Because it’s not just the total value of the opportunity that gives you leverage—it’s getting paid the maximum income for the minimum effort.

It doesn’t help to find an opportunity worth a lot of money if it takes you 100 hours a week to do it.

We build offers with this “effective rate” reality check inside the Consulting Offer Workshop so the offer is actually viable in real life.

Why should developers start small instead of going all-in immediately?

Starting small reduces risk, makes your offer easier to estimate, and forces you to think in effective bill rate—so you can validate your offer alongside your day job before betting everything on it.

This is why I teach developers to start small with their first offer.

It’s less risky. It’s less complicated. It’s easier to estimate. And it forces you to think about the effective bill rate.

I want you to ease into consulting alongside your day job, where you only spend 4 to 8 hours a week doing it. That way, you can validate your offer is solid without risking your income. Then go all-in when you’re truly ready.

That gradual approach matters, because “premium” doesn’t mean “chaos.” It means a repeatable outcome, delivered in a way you can actually sustain.

That’s also why the Consulting Offer Workshop is structured to help you leave with a clear, testable offer you can run in the real world. Not an overbuilt fantasy you’ll never ship.

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