Finding clients is a major undertaking for designers, especially now that so many services exist for the cheap and insincere.

As services like Fiverr and Canva, as well as online services like Tailor Brands and Squarespace, emerge clients are given an incorrect expectation of price and quality. Those kinds of services cater to the cheap, people who don’t care about what they’re doing and thus don’t care that they’re being provided a worthless product. But as more and more people flock to these services, designers are fielding more and more communications asking us for cheap or free work by people entitled by their experiences with cheap services.

While the difference between professional work and DIY or cheap work is night and day, clients are increasingly searching for the cheapest option rather than the best quality and designers are having to spend more time on outreach, creatively communicating the difference.