A UX designer discovered she was losing thousands each month — not because she lacked clients, but because she never tracked a single hour. Here's what changed.
Sarah K. has been a freelance UX designer for over four years. Based out of Austin, Texas, she works with product startups and scale-ups, helping them build interfaces people actually want to use. By all accounts, she was good at her job — her clients renewed, her referrals grew, and her portfolio was strong.
But by the end of 2023, something felt off. She was working constantly, but her bank account didn't reflect it.
The problem wasn't a lack of work. Sarah was booked out three months ahead. The problem was how she estimated projects.
"I'd quote a project based on gut feel," she admits. "I'd think, this should take about 20 hours, so I'll charge for 20 hours. But I had no idea if that was accurate because I never actually measured."
Without any time tracking, Sarah was essentially guessing. And she was consistently wrong — underestimating her hours on almost every project. On a typical branding+UX engagement, she'd quote 25 hours but end up putting in 38. She was losing 13 hours of billable work per project, absorbed as a silent discount she never intended to give.
She tried jotting hours in a spreadsheet. She tried sticky notes. She tried setting phone reminders. Nothing stuck, because everything felt like extra admin on top of already-full days.
A fellow designer in her Slack community mentioned Builtomate. "She said it had a timer built right into the task — you just click and it starts counting. I thought, that's the only kind I'll actually use."
Sarah signed up for the free plan on a Tuesday afternoon. By Friday, she had three projects set up, tasks created, and timers running. She didn't change her workflow — she just added a click at the start and end of each work session.
Sarah's setup is simple. Each client gets a project. Each deliverable (wireframes, prototypes, user testing, revisions) becomes a task. When she sits down to work, she clicks the timer on the active task. When she stops — even for lunch — she stops it.
At the end of each week, she opens the time report for each project. The numbers are already there: hours per task, hours per project, total for the week.
"The first report I ran, I almost fell out of my chair," she says. "I had quoted a project at 22 hours. I was at 31 hours and not even halfway done."
That insight immediately changed how she quoted her next project. She added a 25% buffer to account for the revision cycles she'd always absorbed for free. She also started invoicing time-and-materials for certain client types instead of fixed-price — Builtomate's time logs became her invoice backup documentation.
Within 60 days of tracking, Sarah recalculated her effective hourly rate for the previous six months. It was $58/hr — nearly $40 less than what she thought she was charging.
After adjusting her rates and quoting accurately, her effective rate climbed to $97/hr within one quarter — with no new clients, no new services, and no rate hike that felt uncomfortable. She simply stopped giving away time she wasn't aware of.
"I recovered about $3,200 in a single month just by charging for what I actually work," she says. "That's a mortgage payment I was leaving on the table every single month."
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