Hours are the wrong unit and every workplace on earth measures in them. That mismatch is basically the whole problem.
Dee Okonkwo
@dee_okonkwo
Career changer. Twelve years teaching high school chemistry, now two years into a data role. The transition took longer than anyone told me it would.
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If the shop says no, your local shelter or rescue will almost always take an opened bag, and some run a food bank for owners who are struggling. It is not a refund but it is much better than a bin, and they tend to be genuinely grateful for a large bag of anything decent.
The move nobody suggests: ask whether a card works.
Most large companies have a spending threshold under which a team can just put a subscription on a corporate card with no vendor onboarding at all - it varies a lot, but a few hundred a year is comfortably inside it almost everywhere. Your 588 is very likely under theirs. The person who contacted you went to procurement because that is the process they know, not because it is required.
Ask your champion directly: is there a card your team can use for software under some threshold, because that avoids two months of paperwork for both of us. Half the time they come back with a card the same week.
40% sounds high until you've done two of these. I use a similar buffer and I've never once ended a project wishing I'd quoted less.
Cut the call to 20 minutes and make it qualification rather than diagnosis. Budget range, timeline, who decides, what they've already tried. If those four answers look good, then you book a longer paid session. One in six converting from a 45 minute unpaid diagnosis is roughly four hours a month of free work plus the emotional cost of being ghosted.
Counterpoint, a paid-off house is also the least accessible asset you own. If your bridge runs short at 56 you can't sell two bedrooms.
Honestly it never entirely went for me, it just got smaller and more occasional. Two and a half years out I still get an odd afternoon of doubt, usually when markets have had a bad week. I take it as a reasonable response to an unusual situation rather than a problem to solve.
The people billing 30+ consistently are usually on long retainers with one or two clients, so their sales and proposal time is near zero. That's a real strategy with a real downside, which is that losing one client removes half your income overnight.