Charge by the hour ?

I only charge by the hour if the customer has a punch list of tasks to complete. I do ask for their budget so we know how much we can get accomplished. The, by the job, pricing seems to get less pushback if it's something I can give an estimate on because I it's something I do a lot of. But don't for the, excluding any unforeseen expenses" clause😏

I hate it and never consider it anymore. I tell the customer I am not charging you for my time to complete a job, I am charging you to complete a job on time.

Sometimes a $1200 job takes 2 hours and sometimes a $1200 job takes 6 hours. We all obviously love the 2 hour/$1200 job but reality is, they aren't always like that. Gearing up to go into an attic to quickly reattach a vent pipe or crawling into a tight dirty crawlspace to pass a wire through, vs. walking around a beautiful property looking for structural issues? Same time, different situations. If you had a variable hourly rate maybe you could make that work, but then Mrs. Smith asks why Mrs. Jones only paid $35/hour and your charging her $55.

The mentality of hourly wages get messy way too quickly. You should work on pricing your jobs as a whole and then your mind will be at ease.

We charge by hours.  I just feel that I do not want to take advantage of the customer if it takes less and I do not want to lose if it takes more.  

It depends on the business and tasks. We don’t charge by the hour because we’ve found that 3 structured package offerings works for our niche. 

We do both.  Obviously used estimates hours to guide pricing, but seems to depend on the job for us. 

I've shared this before in here but I'd highly recommend doing block pricing hybrid to the typical hourly if you need some sort of time and materials pricing. Half day and full day. For a couple of reasons - way easier to administrate. ideally you'd want to get them to agree to some sort of price ahead of time. Sure you want to be protected (which is why anyone does hourly) but you also want things to be easy to administrate on the back end. One thing we ran in to when we did hourly was people saying that they had a 15 minute convo about future work that shouldn't be paid for. Basically being hourly invites all the cheap people just because you don't want to think about the job on the front end. 

if you work 4 hours somewhere, you can realistically go to another job and work 4 hours. if you work 6, probably not but then you missed out on two hours of potential pay but you reserved your day for that person. Long term, that's bad business. Also, the more you chop up a price, the more likely someone is to run you around so they can pay as little as possible. We used to do 1/4 days, 1/2 days and full days. Even thought he half days are more, people would still complain about the 1/4 days then run my guys around like crazy then we'd have call backs. Now we do half day minimums and we don't have to drive across town to change one doorknob and make $100 as a company. 

Hourly seems safe but long term it will hurt you. You still need the ability to do something similar so break it up in to half day blocks. I know guys that ONLY charge full days. I'm not there yet but I like that. Trust me, you're always going to have price resistance. Just have price resistance and also make money. That's way better. 

Even better than that, have fixed prices for things. You can quote people faster and take advantage of being efficient. 

I give my hourly rate but I have set rates pending the job requested. Hourly mainly revolves around tasks that I cannot state a set timetable. Example, diagnostics, or, more recently, cleaning and properly treating the power distribution box so the motor and computer functions operate better with a cleaner voltage connection