I’ve only been fully independent for about 2 years now but something i learned pretty quickly is that when you’re not an employee and there is no long term commitment from an employer, hourly rates can be a trap.
They make sense for straight forward 3d modeling services and when the client brings a significant amount of the solution to the table and you’re just helping them execute.
When you’re doing real design work and solving real problems and lending real specialized knowledge pricing should be based on the real value of your contribution. Most companies/clients will pretend this is impossible to quantify because this model is not in their best interest but it’s not an impossible calculation and you can cover the unknowns and the speculative part of the projections with an advance/residual pricing model.
As mentioned previously, an important thing to remember is that the value of your contribution to a fortune 500 is not the same as the value of the same contribution to a startup.