Freelance pricing

[fizzak]

How are you guys pricing your work?

I am currently giving esimates on time, pricing per hour of what my best guess will be to complete the site. Usually the creation goes a few hours over the estimated time but I have to keep the quoted price. So far my customers give me little or no imput as to the look of the site. As you all know this gives great freedom but coming up with something good takes the most time and is hard to estimate.
Right now I am charging around $30 per hour. This is dirt cheap I know, but I don't think my customers can afford much more.
I know a guy who doesn't know HTML image optimization or nesting, has just bare bones knowledge of Dreamweaver and is getting $2-3K per 4 page site! He just knows more people than I.
What do you think?

 

[LDaveM]

Send me his clients names please!! LOL
I do basic web sites using a lot of templates, for $300.00 a year, including hosting. Also, additional pages are $75.00 for normal and $100.00 for form pages.
Have you tried charging by the page?
Mostly what to charge is what the market will bear.
Remember, you always can lower your price, but it hard to raise it.

 

[algraff]

Sounds like you're doing pretty good to me.
Living in rural appalachia, things are pretty tight economically. Best I have been able to get for 3 months of simple web page maintenance is $100. Simple HTML web page setups are a $150 flat fee, $400 for more complex ones. If I could get $30/hour for steady work doing HTML I'd quit my day job

http://www.algraff.com

:

http://www.sunshine-church.org

http://www.stanleysauctions.com

http://www.bv.k12.oh.us

 

[TruthInSatire]

I charge 500/site then 20/month for hosting and maintenance.

i offer to let them pay the 500 over the span of a year so they pay 60/month (hosting and design) for the first 12 months, then down to 20 unless they want a whole new design. i have more luck breaking up the 500 payment than i did asking only a one time price of 300. of course there are written agreements that sate if they move hosts or shutdown the site prior to 12 months they still pay the remainder of the 500.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

 

[ecobb]

My day job is doing in house programming/database administration for a mid-sized company, but I generally try to keep several side projects going so I can have an excuse to sit in front of a computer at night and on the weekends.

All of my side projects are for corporate customers (Real Estate Developers, State Organizations, Manufacturing Companies, etc...). Depending on what the client wants, I generally charge around $1,500 and up for new project development, and I won't touch anything for less than $1,000 unless it's updates or changes to one of my existing projects. I have, on the very rare occasion, done projects for $500, but that was for a good friend or business associate so I gave them the "good 'ole boy" discount, because I know they do stuff for me a lot cheaper than they should.

I don't fool with hosting, I leave that up to the customer's preference (most of them have their own servers anyway). If the customer doesn't know or care, then I make some recommendations and turn them over to some of my buddies in the hosting business.

On some projects I have recurring updates, on others it's just a couple of times a year the customer wants some changes made, or sometimes none at all. For example, I just finished a project that I charged $1,500 for the development and $200 per month for weekly updates. I have another project that I charged $1,200 for, and every 6 months I get $100 to update their license and certification info on the site.

To put it in perspective, though, I'm not just talking about building a web site. My sites are full fledged applications, with database backends and (usually) some type of content management built in. And with the time involved in building one, I generally only have 4-5 side projects per year.



Hope This Helps!

Ecobb
Beer Consumption Analyst

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher

 

[TruthInSatire]

haha $1,500/site around here... yeah right i wish.

I'm like you though I make a site with built in content management (mainly to save myself some time, let them update as much of the site as possible without having to contact me. they like the freedom too) I don't mind charging less for the site when I get a garonteed check for hosting every month.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

 

[ecobb]

I don't mind charging less for the site when I get a garonteed check for hosting every month.

Yeah, that monthly recurring revenue is sweet! It's whole lot easier to figure on a guarenteed $125 per month than it is to hope you get a $1,500 job before the end of the year! (-: It works wonders for your budget!



Hope This Helps!

Ecobb
Beer Consumption Analyst

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher

 

[TruthInSatire]

if you don't mind me asking, what are some of your sites?

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

 

[ecobb]

Well, most of my stuff has been for Intranets and is not publicly accessible, or if it is it's locked down. I guess I could give you links to some login screens.

Here's one site that I've been working on, I'm almost finished with it. I was actually going to post it here for review, let me know what you think. It's got a built in CMS and they've already started using it, so don't hold me accountable for whatever they may have on there!

http://www.missga.org

Hope This Helps!

Ecobb
Beer Consumption Analyst

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher

 

[TruthInSatire]

no contact webmaster link?

looks good, i'll post more when you make a thread for the review.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

 

[fizzak]

I've only done a couple of sites so far and half of them were replacements for extremely poor designs by others. These sites, the customers were paying $80+ per month to keep the site and hosting. This is a major rip off and was one of my selling points to get the customer. I can get far better hosting for $100 yr. But now that I got 2 customers this month who have decided not to pay me my lump sum fee. This is looking more like a more attractive option.