freelance-rate

freelance-rate is a cursor rule for Cursor from mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills. It costs 108 tokens per session (1,054 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A calculator that works backwards from a freelancer's desired personal income to an hourly or daily rate.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to set consulting prices, compare hourly and day rates, and prepare a justification for a proposed fee.
Why use it?
It accounts for taxes, business costs, unpaid work, time off, and gaps between projects that a salary-based calculation often ignores. It also explains the resulting rate to clients.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Written for Cursor: a Cursor rule (.mdc).

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 scripts/freelance_rate.py --target 90000.

Good fit Use it to set consulting prices, compare hourly and day rates, and prepare a justification for a proposed fee.

Compare 6 cursor rules from other repositories ↓
About the project

PM Skills is a collection of plain-Markdown instructions that teach AI assistants structured methods for handling professional, personal, and life-admin tasks. People use it with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Codex, and other supported agents for work such as writing product requirements, reviewing documents, or planning difficult situations.

mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills · 1,352 stars · on GitHub · mohitagw15856.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for freelance-rate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for freelance-rate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/freelance-rate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 108 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,054 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00108 $0.01054
Opus 5 $0.00054 $0.00527
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00105

Measured 7d ago against content hash aeaca79df2f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

freelance-rate scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

exports/cursor/pm-calculators/freelance-rate/freelance-rate.mdc · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Freelance Rate Skill

New freelancers price by dividing their old salary by 2,000 hours and wondering why they're broke by March. The employer was silently paying for benefits, taxes, tools, sales time, and dry spells — and now all of that lives inside the rate. This skill derives the rate backwards from target income through honest utilization, so the number arrives with its own justification attached — which is exactly what you need when a client asks why you charge it.

What This Skill Produces

  • Required revenue — target income + self-employment tax premium + business overhead
  • Honest billable hours — working weeks × hours × billable %, with the billable % defended
  • The rate — hourly and day rate, plus the multiplier vs naive salary÷2000
  • The justification narrative — the same math in client-safe words, for the "why so much?" conversation

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

  • Target pre-tax personal income — what they want to pay themselves, not what they hope to gross
  • Business overhead — insurance, tools, accounting, coworking (default $12,000/yr, labeled)
  • Weeks off — vacation + sick + admin-only weeks (default 6, labeled)
  • Billable % — the honest one; 60% is a realistic default, 80%+ is a mature practice with full pipeline, 100% is a fantasy

Programmatic Helper

python3 scripts/freelance_rate.py --target 90000
python3 scripts/freelance_rate.py --target 90000 --billable-pct 55 --overhead 14000 --json

Deterministic. The tax premium default (8%) is a placeholder for the self-employment delta and varies by jurisdiction — set --extra-tax-pct to the user's real number or say it's the default.

Framework: The Utilization Honesty Rules

  • Billable % is the make-or-break input — sales calls, proposals, invoicing, learning, and gaps between clients are all unbillable; freelancers who assume 100% have priced their own bankruptcy
  • The employer's invisible spend is now yours — payroll-tax share, benefits, equipment, paid holidays: the reason market contract rates run 1.5–2.5× salary-equivalent hourly, and why that multiple is fair, not greedy
  • Derive backwards, not forwards — start from the life the rate must fund; "what do competitors charge" is a sanity check, not a derivation
  • Round up, not down — a rate you can discount from beats a rate you must survive on; anchoring low is nearly irreversible with an existing client
  • The rate is also a filter — clients who balk at a defensible rate are usually the ones who scope-creep; the math doubles as the screening mechanism

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 77 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A aeaca79df2f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

freelance-rate is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills (1,352 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 1,054 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.