How-to guide · Clients & workflow

How to charge for extra revisions

By the WorkKitly Team · Last updated: November 2026 · 7 min read

Unlimited revisions is not generosity; it is an unpriced option you granted on your own hours, exercisable at midnight, indefinitely. The client who takes round six is rarely abusing anything — they are using exactly what the proposal offered. The fix is not charging for every change, and it is not a sterner email when the tweaks pile up. It is a menu, agreed before the work starts: define what a round is, include a counted number of them in each phase, count them out loud as the work moves, and have the price of the next round already written down. This guide builds that menu — the definition, the two honest ways to price an extra round, the counting discipline that makes the boundary real without an argument, and the edge cases, starting with the one that matters most: your own mistakes are never a round.

1. What a round actually is

Every revision argument is really a definition argument. The client believes a round is whenever they send feedback; you believe it is whenever you deliver a version; both of you are guessing, and the guesses only collide when the count starts to matter. So define it where definitions live, in the project brief, in one sentence: a round is one consolidated set of feedback on one deliverable, sent together, and answered with one revised version. Each clause earns its place. One deliverable, so feedback on the homepage is not a round on the logo. Sent together, so the set has edges. One revised version back, so a round is measured by your delivery cycle — the unit you actually spend.

Five emails carrying one thought each is still one round — if it is consolidated before you answer it. The skill is asking for the consolidation, and asking in a way that sells itself: 'Send me everything in one pass, and I will turn it round in one go — you will see the next version days sooner than if we trade it piecemeal.' Scattered feedback is where rounds secretly multiply: each dribble, answered separately, burns a full delivery cycle — reopen the files, reload the context, re-export, re-send — while counting as nothing on any tally. Consolidation is not pedantry. It is the difference between one round and five wearing one round's clothes.

Three things wear the name and are not rounds. A new deliverable — a second homepage, an extra landing page, a logo variant nobody briefed — is not feedback on the work; it is new work, and it belongs to scope creep's territory, priced with the scope creep cost calculator. A new direction after the direction was approved — returning to the road the brief considered and set aside — is a restart, not a revision: the earlier rounds were spent walking the chosen road properly. And feedback from a stakeholder who was not in the earlier rounds is a new round by definition, because none of it was in the sets you already answered; section 5 has the polite sentence for it.

2. The menu itself

The menu has three lines: how many rounds are included, what counts as one, and what the next one costs. Include rounds per phase, not per project — a design phase and a build phase attract feedback at different weights, and a single project-wide count lets one hungry phase eat the whole allowance. The worked shape in this guide is two rounds per phase: the first fixes what is wrong, the second polishes what is right, and anything beyond that is usually new information rather than revision. Two is a default, not a law — the questions below cover the trades where a round is minutes long. What is not optional is that the number exists, in writing, before round one.

Price the extra round one of two honest ways, chosen by what a round actually costs you. A flat per-round fee fits small deliverables, where a round is roughly an hour of turning: charge the hour. At the $95 rate this guide's examples use, that is $95 a round — a headline set, a page of copy, a logo sheet. A percentage of the phase fee fits big deliverables, where a round is a serious block of work: 10% of the phase fee is the worked shape here, so a $1,900 phase carries a $190 extra round — about two hours at the same rate, which is what a round on a deliverable that size usually runs. The test is your own history: if your rounds regularly overrun the flat fee's hour, you are on the wrong pricing, and the percentage is the honest one.

Run the worked phase both ways. A $1,900 phase, two rounds included, the client takes four: the menu charges the two extra rounds at $190 — $380, agreed before round three began, invoiced without apology or a difficult conversation. Now delete the menu and run it again: the client takes the same four rounds, the two extra ones cost about two hours each, and four hours at $95 is the same $380 — given away silently instead of charged. The menu does not invent the cost of round four. The hours were always real; the menu just decides, in advance, whose account they land in.

And the menu has to live where agreements live: printed in the proposal, carried into the contract basics. A menu that first appears when round three arrives is not a menu; it is a surprise, and clients are right to push back on surprises. Printed before signing, the same numbers are simply the shape of the engagement — the client who read them at the proposal stage chose them, and a price that was chosen is never the one that gets argued about.

3. The counting discipline

A boundary nobody counts is a rumour. The counter lives in the status update: every update carries the line as routine reporting — 'Round 2 of 2 on the homepage draft' — stated the same way you state what is done and what is next, never as a warning. Counting in the open from round one is what makes the boundary real without an argument at round three: nobody is surprised by a number they have already read twice, and the client can spend their included rounds deliberately instead of discovering the allowance existed only when it ran out.

Define approval, too: a deliverable is approved when the client says so in words — an email reply counts — and it is worth asking for the word itself: 'Reply "approved" and I will lock this phase and move to the next.' What approval closes matters as much. Feedback arriving after approval does not stretch the last round backwards; as a rule of thumb, it starts a new round if rounds remain, and an extra round or a new phase if they do not. That is not stiffness — it is what lets you lock, schedule and bill the next phase without holding everything open in case an approved thing un-approves itself.

Give each round a feedback window: a stated number of working days — five is the worked shape — inside which that round's feedback arrives. The window is not impatience; a phase held open for a month of silence is a phase you cannot schedule around. Feedback that surfaces after long silence is not really a late round, either: it is a restart, with files to reopen and context to reload, and it should be priced and scheduled as one — the same logic what to do when a project stalls on the client applies to a project that wakes up and expects to be resumed mid-sentence.

4. When the extra-round conversation happens

Early, and at a warm moment: the sentence goes out with the delivery of the last included round, while the client still holds that free round in their hand and the relationship is running on delivered work. Left until the extra round is requested, the same sentence arrives as a toll gate on a road the client thought was open. Sent with round two, it reads as what it is — a standing offer, priced and ready. Say this, or your own version of it (45 words):

Attached is round two of two on the homepage draft — everything in this one is included, as agreed. If you'd like to keep going after this, a third round is $190, and I'm glad to do it whenever you're ready: just say the word.

And hear what the sentence is not: a refusal. The menu is an offer, not a wall, and the client who happily pays for round four is a good client — often your best kind, the one who values the work enough to buy more of it at a price agreed in daylight. Extra rounds at the menu price are clean, profitable, welcome work. The freelancers who suffer over revisions are never the ones whose clients buy them; they are the ones giving the same hours away and calling the resentment professionalism.

5. The edge cases

Your mistake is never a round. Errors, missed brief points, the broken link, the typo in the headline you wrote: those are fixes — free, fast, and uncounted, with no discussion about which column they land in. A revision is the client refining a preference or changing their mind; a fix is you delivering what was already agreed. Confuse the two — charge a fix as a round — and you spend trust that no menu earns back. When a change could be called either, it is a fix. That single rule is this page's ethical spine, and it is also commercial sense: clients accept menus from people whose fixes were never metered.

The endless-polish client is a different problem: the rounds get smaller and vaguer, nearer to launch anxiety than to direction, and no price cures it, because the client is not buying changes — they are postponing a decision. The cure is the approval definition doing its work, plus a smaller next commitment: end the open phase, and offer the remaining doubts as a small, bounded piece of work — a paid discovery-sized phase, or a launch-then-review structure where the polish happens against real use instead of imagined use. Shrink the decision until it is makeable, and the rounds stop.

And the committee problem: at round three, a new stakeholder appears — a partner, a manager, a spouse — with feedback that contradicts the rounds already spent. By section 1's definition it is a new round: none of it was in the sets you answered. The polite sentence is: 'Glad to fold their notes in — that is exactly what the next round is for, and I will turn it round as one pass.' Then fix the cause in the next brief: the approver is named, in the room, from round one — a line the project brief should carry every time, because committees are only expensive when they arrive as surprises.

Questions

Two per phase is this guide's worked default — practice, not law. The reasoning: one round to fix what is wrong, a second to polish what is right, and a third almost never arrives as revision at all — it arrives as new information, a changed mind or a new stakeholder, which is exactly what the extra-round price exists for. Trades differ, and the menu should follow the round's real weight: where a round is twenty minutes on a headline set, include more; where it is two days on a build, two is generous. The number matters less than the writing: counted, priced beyond, and never unlimited.
Not as a round of a closed phase — approval and delivery end the count, so a later change is new work. Price it at the extra-round rate when it is small and self-contained, and as a small new phase when it is not. The longer the silence before it arrives, the more it is also a restart: files reopened, context reloaded, and honestly scheduled as one. One exception never moves, whenever it surfaces: your own error is a fix, free — a defect found a month after delivery is still yours, not a round and not new work.
Count kindly, but keep the definition: a round is measured by your delivery cycle, not by their sending habits. Feedback that arrives in five messages before you have answered any of it is one set — say so, and answer it as one round. Feedback that arrives across five days, each message answered with a new version, is five cycles of your time — say that once, kindly, with the offer attached: one consolidated pass from them buys the fastest turnaround you give anyone. Most clients consolidate the moment they see it buys them speed.
The menu scales with the job, which is the answer: on a small deliverable the flat fee is an hour at your rate, and on a tiny job that is a tiny price — the menu's point was never the amount. What is actually petty is the alternative arithmetic: rounds absorbed in silence, resented, and quietly recovered in a padded quote next time, which the client pays without ever seeing. A small price printed in advance is the more respectful document — and clients who read it at the proposal stage almost never mention it again.

Related: the definition, the dispute, the creep line

Price the rounds where they are first promised: how to write a project brief is where the included count and the approver get named. When the argument is not about the count but about whether a change is a revision at all, how to handle a scope dispute sorts it against the written words. And when a 'revision' is really new work wearing feedback's clothes, the scope creep cost calculator prices what it actually costs.