In 2017, fresh out of my corporate tech job and committed full-time to consulting.
I set my hourly rate at $150 an hour.
40 hours a week=$6k.
I bought a fancy espresso machine to celebrate.
But my bank account didn’t grow.
I worked from sunrise to sunset.
I felt tired.
I felt broke.
When tax season arrived, I had to borrow money from our savings to pay the IRS.
I wasn’t making $150 an hour.
Instead, I was paying to work
I was consulting for a freelance web designer.
She wanted to use AI to build websites faster.
She thought tools like ChatGPT would cut her work time in half.
Because of this, she lowered her project rates to win more clients.
She thought she was being smart.
But she made a common mistake.
She forgot that AI output is rarely ready to use.
She spent hours editing bad code. She spent hours fixing weird text formatting and and rewriting prompts.
She also ignored her rising software costs.
She paid for four different AI subscriptions.
When we looked at her calendar, she worked 50 hours a week.
But she only billed clients for 12 hours.
The rest of her time went to admin work and fighting with AI tools.
After taxes and software fees, she made $14 per hour.
She did not build a business.
She built a low-wage job for herself by forgetting to calculate the human labor required to manage the technology.
Look, AI will not do your taxes.
If someone tells you it will, they want your money.
But an LLM is a very good calculator when you give it clear rules.
I built these four prompts to run the math & show you the exact number you must charge to survive.
This prompt categorizes your time.
It shows you exactly how many hours you work for free.
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