A UI/UX Designer's First Freelance Project: What Rs 11,200 Included

The founder messaged me at 11 PM asking if the dashboard could "feel more premium." I stared at that message for a solid 4 minutes trying to figure out what premium meant in pixels.

That question, more than anything technical, is what my first paid UI/UX project actually taught me. Sixteen screens, Rs 9,800 total, delivered to a two-person SaaS startup building an analytics dashboard. Here's the honestly messy version of how that went.

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Learning Figma without any design background

No formal training here. My degree is in something unrelated entirely, and design happened almost by accident after watching one YouTube tutorial out of boredom one evening.

Five months of pure practice followed. I built 2 projects purely for a portfolio, no client attached to either: a fitness app concept, and a SaaS analytics dashboard redesign based on a tool I already used and had opinions about.

Posted both on Behance and Dribbble. Views were unremarkable, somewhere between 6 and 25 per post most days. Then, out of nowhere, a founder building something similar to what I'd redesigned sent a message asking if I did freelance work.

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The brief that kept changing

First call, I said "sounds good" more times than I actually understood what was being asked. Classic mistake. I hadn't prepared real questions: who's the target user, what competitors does this need to beat, what's the actual business goal behind this redesign.

Second call fixed that. Went in with a list this time. Got a real brief: 16 screens covering onboarding, main dashboard, three report views, settings, and a handful of smaller states.

Wireframes came first, done on paper honestly, then moved into Figma. That stage alone took about 34 hours spread across roughly 16 days. Actually, that number overstates the productive time. Maybe 22 of those hours were genuinely useful work. The rest went into redoing things I'd gotten wrong the first time.

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Revisions, and what "premium" actually meant

First draft went out, and 7 change requests came back. Nothing unreasonable, just more than I'd budgeted time for.

Second draft, 4 more small requests. By the third round we were mostly polishing: contrast ratios, spacing consistency, one stubborn dropdown menu that never looked quite right no matter what I tried.

Then came the "more premium" message. Took a day of back-and-forth to figure out what that meant in practice: darker background tones, more whitespace between elements, a subtler accent color instead of the bright blue I'd originally used. Once I understood it, the fix took maybe 90 minutes. Understanding it took far longer than fixing it.

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Where the deadline actually slipped

I quoted 12 days originally. It took 19. Partly my fault, I underestimated how long revision cycles eat into a schedule when you're new at pricing your own time.

Partly the client's fault too, to be fair. Feedback took 3 to 5 days to come back each round instead of the 24 hours we'd loosely agreed on. Nobody was really wrong here. Startups move unevenly, and I hadn't built slack into my own estimate to account for that.

He didn't seem bothered by the delay in the end. Genuinely thought that would be a bigger deal than it turned out to be.

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What it actually paid, worked out honestly

Rs 9,800 total for 16 screens comes to roughly Rs 613 per screen. Time invested: about 34 hours of design work, plus another 8 or so in calls and revisions. Call it 42 hours total.

That puts the effective rate somewhere around Rs 233 an hour. Not impressive. Not embarrassing either, for a first paid project where I had no room to push back on price and a lot of learning happening in real time.

The same client came back about 7 weeks later for a second project, this time paying Rs 16,400 for a smaller scope, fewer screens but a tighter timeline. Faster turnaround too, because by then I actually understood how he communicated and what "premium" meant to him specifically.

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There's still something I haven't cracked. Some clients glance at a screen for maybe 3 seconds and either love it or don't, decision made instantly. Others scrutinize every 2-pixel spacing choice like they're the ones who'll be defending it to a board. Both types exist in roughly equal numbers in my experience so far, and I still don't have a reliable way to tell which one I'm dealing with before the first call ends.