You're Not Undercharging Because You're Bad at Math

You've been debugging your pricing for months. Running A/B tests on your rates, tweaking your proposals, adjusting your packages. You read the salary surveys, compared yourself to market data, maybe even built a spreadsheet that models your hourly rate against your costs. But the output is always the same: you quote high, feel the resistance, and drop the number before the client even pushes back. Or you accept the offer knowing it's below what the role pays because the negotiation window felt like a personal evaluation you didn't want to fail. You've tried to fix this with better data. More comps. More market research. More evidence that people with your skills charge more. None of it sticks. The number in the proposal always drifts back down. This Is Not a Pricing Bug It's a type error. You're passing your self-worth where the function expects market value. // What your brain is running: function setRate(selfWorth: PersonalIdentity): number { return selfWorth.howIFeelToday * imposter