Discovery call last month. SaaS startup, 12 people, looking to hire a freelance UX designer.
“We need someone 15 to 20 hours a week. Flexible schedule. Remote. Rate is $85 an hour.”
Reasonable. I asked about the work.
“We’re redesigning the onboarding flow. Should take 4 to 6 weeks. Then ongoing UX improvements as needed.”
Still fine. Then:
“You’ll join our daily standups at 9am. We use Slack for all communication – expect to be responsive during business hours. Weekly sprint planning on Mondays. Design reviews every Thursday. Oh, and we might need you to jump on calls with stakeholders sometimes. Usually short notice.”
I stopped them.
“So you want a freelance UX designer who’s available like an employee?”
“Well, not exactly an employee. Just… available when we need you.”
That’s an employee. You’re describing an employee.
I declined. They hired someone else. That person was Open for Work on LinkedIn two weeks later.
What You’re Actually Asking For
When companies want to hire a freelance UX designer with employee availability, the math doesn’t work – and not in the abstract way, in the actual hours-in-a-week way.
The contract said 20 hours at $85 an hour. Here’s where those 20 hours go with the expectations described on that call:
Daily standups at 30 minutes each: 2.5 hours a week. Sprint planning: 2 hours. Design reviews: 1.5 hours. Slack responsiveness – context switching, partial responses, “quick questions” that aren’t quick: conservatively 4 hours. Stakeholder calls quoted as 30 minutes that run 90: call it 2 hours. Unplanned check-ins: 1 hour.
That’s 13 hours of meetings and communication overhead. Leaving 7 hours for design work.
Except design work requires uninterrupted time. You can’t map a coherent onboarding flow in 30-minute chunks between Slack pings about button copy. So really, you’re getting 4 to 5 hours of productive output per week.
At $85 an hour across 20 hours: $1,700 a week. For 4 to 5 hours of actual design.
That’s $340 to $425 an hour for the work itself, plus $85 an hour for someone to attend your meetings and answer your Slack messages. At that point you’re not hiring a freelance UX designer. You’re hiring a very expensive part-time employee without the benefits, the PTO, or the job security.
Just hire an employee. They’ll quit in 8 months instead of 2 weeks. Progress.
What You’re Asking the Designer to Give Up
There’s another side to this math that companies don’t think about when they want to hire a freelance UX designer with employee expectations.
Freelancers have 3 to 4 clients simultaneously. That’s how the economics of freelancing work. When you require 9am standups and same-day Slack availability, you’re making it functionally impossible to take other work. Which means you need to compensate for the clients they’re turning down to meet your availability requirements. You’re not. You’re paying project rates while expecting retainer exclusivity.
The deeper problem is what you’re doing to the actual work. Senior designers do their best thinking in 3 to 4 hour uninterrupted blocks. When you fragment their day with standups, check-ins, and instant message expectations, you’re not buying their expertise anymore. You’re buying their presence. Those are not the same thing.
You’re paying to hire a freelance UX designer and getting junior-level output because the working conditions you’ve created make senior-level thinking impossible.
What the Expectations Actually Say
The job post or discovery call tells you everything if you know what you’re reading. Some translations:
“Responsive during business hours” means you’ll get pinged at 6pm about something that isn’t urgent and will be expected to respond.
“Fast-paced environment” means planning doesn’t happen here. Expect Thursday afternoon requests that need to be done Monday morning. Every week.
“Become part of the team” means you want a team member without the cost of a team member. It also means the holiday party. Participation non-optional.
“Potential to convert to full-time” sometimes means genuine evaluation. Usually means work like an employee for 9 months while we decide if you’re worth benefits. The answer is generally no.
“Flexible schedule” means flexible about which hours, as long as they’re business hours, as long as you’re always reachable, as long as nothing your other clients need conflicts with anything we need.
The thing is – none of this is malicious. Companies aren’t trying to exploit anyone. They genuinely don’t know what they need. They know they can’t afford a full-time hire so they reach for the freelance model, then they import all the working habits of a full-time team onto it without realising what they’ve created. The result is a project structure that satisfies neither side and usually ends badly for both.
What Actually Works
I’ve had good freelance engagements. The working conditions that made them good are not complicated.
Async-first communication. I respond when I’m working on their project – same day, sometimes next morning if I’m deep in something else. Nobody panics if I don’t reply in 20 minutes. This is not a radical arrangement. It’s just how professional work functions when both parties respect each other’s time.
A meeting budget that gets respected. One weekly check-in, 45 minutes. Design reviews when there are actual decisions to make. That’s the whole list. If a company needs more meetings than that to feel confident the work is progressing, they’re not ready for a freelance engagement. They need someone embedded in their process full-time – which is a legitimate need, just a different one.
Clear deliverables instead of vague availability. “Design the onboarding flow for new users” is a deliverable. “Be available for whatever comes up” is not. The first one I can price, scope, and deliver. The second one is a commitment to an unknown amount of work at a fixed rate, which only works out well for one party.
Advance notice for calls. Book it 2 to 3 days ahead and I’ll be there, prepared, with the right context loaded. “Can you jump on in 10 minutes?” is a question I stopped answering yes to around year four. Not because I’m difficult – because the calls that get booked with 10 minutes notice are almost never about something that couldn’t have been an async message, and always run longer than advertised.
The common thread is trust. They trust that the work is happening without needing to observe it. I trust that feedback will be clear without needing to guess at it. This is the baseline for any professional design engagement that produces good work. It’s also apparently the hardest thing to establish.
When You Actually Need an Employee
Sometimes the answer is genuinely: hire an employee. Nothing wrong with that.
If daily coordination is structurally necessary for your product process – not preferred, structurally necessary – hire an employee. If the role has no clear deliverables and no foreseeable end, hire an employee. If you need someone embedded in your team culture who attends every meeting and is reachable whenever something comes up, hire an employee. If your working style is reactive and you know it and don’t plan to change it, hire an employee.
Employees are good. They’re designed for exactly this. Pay them properly, give them benefits, and you’ll get the availability and responsiveness you’re looking for.
What doesn’t work is hiring a freelance UX designer and expecting employee availability at freelance rates, because you end up with the costs of both models and the benefits of neither. The designer can’t do their best work in the conditions you’ve created. You can’t get the responsiveness you need from someone who has other clients and other commitments. Both of you end up frustrated at a situation neither of you named correctly at the start.
What I Ask Now
Before I take any engagement, three questions:
“What meetings do you expect me to attend?” Daily anything is the answer that ends the conversation. Weekly with a clear agenda is fine.
“How do you handle urgent requests?” Everyone says nothing is urgent until Thursday at 4pm. I’m listening for whether they’ve actually thought about this or whether “urgent” means “whenever the founder has an idea.”
“What happens if I’m unavailable for a day?” The answer tells you everything about whether they understand what freelancing is. “No problem, we work async” means they get it. “We’d need advance notice” means you’ve become their primary design resource and they’ve quietly made you responsible for their planning failures.
These aren’t trick questions. They’re just the questions that reveal whether the contract being offered matches the working relationship being described. Usually they do. Sometimes they don’t. The ones that don’t look exactly like that discovery call – reasonable on the surface, employee-shaped underneath.
I don’t take those anymore.
The person who did was Open for Work on LinkedIn two weeks later.