My first rate as a freelance bookkeeper was $4 an hour. On paper, that sounded impressive — more than 200 pesos an hour, paid in US dollars. In reality, it wasn't even full-time, and the entire arrangement felt like riding out one storm after another. I'd climb to around $200 in a good month, then lose the client entirely and start over from zero.
That instability wasn't the real problem, though. The real problem, the one that followed me for years afterward, was that I genuinely did not know how to price myself.
The Quotation That Wouldn't Come Out
There was a specific moment that exposed this clearly. A prospect asked me to diagnose his business's operational mess — manual tracking of projects, job orders, receivables, payables, sales commissions, all of it chaotic. My diagnosis was simple and correct: he needed QuickBooks Online.
Then he asked the question I dreaded: "Magkano?"
I froze. Not because I didn't know how to set it up — that part was basic for me. I froze because pricing had been a problem I'd been quietly carrying for a long time, and I couldn't fully explain to myself why it felt so heavy. I told him honestly: this has been a struggle for me, I don't know why, even though the setup itself is simple.
His response changed the trajectory of that relationship — he offered to let me set up his own systems first, so he could see the actual value delivered, and from there tell me what he thought it was worth. I didn't know whether to celebrate or feel defeated. New client, yes — but I genuinely didn't know if I'd end up making money from it or not.
The Leap That Made No Financial Sense
Around this same period, I did something abrupt enough that even my own family and friends didn't see it coming — I booked a flight to Manila, heading to Cavite for an opportunity I wasn't even fully sure about. No signed quotation. No guaranteed scope. Just a strong, gut-level conviction that this was a now-or-never moment.
I arrived with nothing formalized. It took nearly two weeks before we even discussed the actual scope of the project — they were waiting patiently, and I kept delaying the number I owed them. Eventually, I had to be honest a second time: I genuinely didn't know how to price this engagement. So we used ChatGPT together to work out a reasonable figure. It suggested $1,000 — roughly 60,000 pesos. I offered net-60 terms, two months to pay. They agreed.
Even after agreeing, something still felt unresolved in my chest. I still didn't fully know if I'd priced it right. But the deal was real, the client was a legitimate B2B relationship, and it became a foothold into a bigger, more corporate-adjacent tier of clients than I'd worked with before.
The Other Half of Sustainability: Radical Focus
Pricing confidence was one half of the shift toward sustainability. The other half was something less about money and more about mastery: I made a deliberate decision, early in my freelance bookkeeping journey, to focus almost entirely on one accounting software — QuickBooks Online — instead of spreading myself across every platform on the market.
Over roughly four years of that focus, my confidence in QuickBooks Online became absolute. Not bragging — just fact, at this point in my journey. And what surprised me most wasn't the depth I gained in that one software. It was how easily that depth transferred. When clients came to me using other platforms — Wave Accounting, a Filipino-made accounting and tax tool I encountered during an internship — adjusting to them turned out to be far easier than expected, precisely because I understood the underlying logic of accounting systems so deeply through one tool.
Nasa focus lang ang sekreto — the secret really was in the focus. You don't need to chase every new software or every new skill to stay relevant. You need to go deep enough in one that the underlying principles become second nature, and the rest becomes easy to adapt to.
What Actually Changed Between $4/Hour and Sustainable
Looking back, the shift from unstable $4-an-hour freelancing to something sustainable wasn't really about finding better clients, though that helped. It was about two internal shifts: getting honest and deliberate about pricing instead of freezing up or underselling out of fear, and going deep in one area of mastery instead of staying shallow across many.
Neither of those shifts happened instantly. The pricing conversations still felt heavy even when I handled them reasonably well. The Cavite leap could easily have gone badly. But each uncomfortable pricing conversation and each hour spent going deeper into one software built the foundation that eventually made "sustainable" possible — not luck, but a series of decisions made even while still unsure of the outcome.
To know more about my services, writings — connect with me here — here's my website: https://www.kylenelsonomac.com/
Mahal na mahal kita. Mahal na mahal ka ng Diyos. Faith without action is nothing.