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I've been a freelance-only web developer for 10 years. Honestly with only general web dev skills and mostly PHP you'll be hard pressed to get over $65/hr. I kn

I've been a freelance-only web developer for 10 years. Honestly with only general web dev skills and mostly PHP you'll be hard pressed to get over $65/hr. I know Django and I still strike out at getting Django projects pitched at $65/hr. But I think it has mostly to do with the economy. Once you want to cross a certain threshold you need to have more structure in place as a business (with project rates and lots of time spent coddling clients and doing documentation), some really specialized and in-demand skills or a long-running career with some impressive success behind you. I've pulled in $100/hr+ in the past, but it was due to a complete package of project management, design and creative direction and oodles of documentation and meetings etc. Operating almost as a shop, not freelance I don't know who all these folks are that claim they're getting $125/hr rates but I suspect they have more up their sleeve than just run of the mill web programming. You take what the market will give you or you lose projects its that simple.

volomike 17y ago
As a fulltime and fairly successful freelancer now going on my third year, I completely agree with rwhitman here. However, I have something else to offer. The original poster needs to stop thinking of freelancing as the only thing he does. He needs passive income and affiliate marketing projects. But that requires free time. My suggestion on getting free time is to take those periods where you do sales/marketing/advertising stints for new gigs, and outsource that to offshore virtual assistants. That gives you a little bit of free time to slip in the start of a project, and then in the next month you can finish it. For ideas on what to do, visit mixergy.com and let your mind wander from there. As for affiliate marketing, just start with the advice on affbuzz.com and move from there.
silencio 17y ago
> But I think it has mostly to do with the economy. I don't think so. The majority of my freelance work is web development, and I bill at least double that - $100 to as much as $300/hr if I can get away with it, and only web development, because I know nothing about design and other things and will freely admit to it. I don't really do anything specialized, I just have a list of former and current clients from the past few years who are all very happy, and nothing fancy there either. New clients are often through word-of-mouth, which I've very much enjoyed as many clients referred to me by a former client that I enjoyed working with are usually a joy to work with as well. Oh, and not so much PHP, but mostly Rails, occasionally weirder stuff (Java, perl!). Note that the hourly rate is not what I usually offer to clients, I give them a project rate based on what they want. People seem to be fine enough paying five figures for a completed project, not so much billed specifically by hours (unless the situation demands such a thing). The only thing that may make a difference here is that I live in Los Angeles, where there are lots of potential clients, the cost of living is cringe-worthy, and to ask too little is to ask for trouble as a freelancer. I very much doubt my web dev skills could pull in that kind of money in, say, somewhere in Montana. And the very extremes of my rate are extremes. $300/hr, if you want me to pull allnighters to get something done in one week. $100 for those super long projects that just drag on forever and you're not actually doing anything significant.. Anyway, if I had a useful suggestion, it would be to stop looking on sites where most of the projects are ridiculously simplistic or skills are undervalued...like craigslist. I used to eye the local jobs via rss of craigslist's software jobs and such, and ugh, it was all listings like "oh we want 10 years exp with x" and offering some ridiculous pittance at best, and "will trade (your skills) for (my...skills?)" at worst. There's some reasonable contract work to be had on like dice.com, and there is nothing quite like networking with your local community and going from there. Be assertive about your hourly rate, but not too much. Anyone that isn't coming to the table with a good budget isn't worth working with in the long term, because they're also the same jerks that'll try to weasel their way out of paying for the extra work they want done and such. But you know your skills and your limits, and your clients need to feel that they got their money's worth out of you. Also, keep in mind that charging more than someone else might really does make people think you're worth it. I don't usually get bundled into the "my next door neighbor's kid can do this website for minimum wage" or "what a ripoff" groups, more like the "this person knows what we need and gets it done right and on time and is worth the expense" group. :p If I lose projects to someone else over the price, so be it. I need to be desperately in need of work to be willing to work on a project while extremely underpaid, and even then I had better still be getting something else in exchange to make it worthwhile. I accept everything from cookies and sushi lunch to some serious credibility gain (i.e. volunteering for a good cause).
- rwhitman 17y ago
  Interesting, I actually live in LA as well. Here's the thing with project rates - I'm obsessive with clocking time. I clock everything, every second. Sometimes you bid on a project where you say to yourself "oh yea! I'm getting $300/hr for this" but what happens is as it drags on you try to clock less time to justify the rate and just start guesstimating. In reality if you clock meetings, calls, time responding to emails, documentation, research, project planning etc the rate always ends up being much, much lower. Its not just time coding. Anyhow not saying that's your situation, but I think a lot of people who claim high rates forget about non-production hours when they make their project quotes. But having Java and Perl skills are definitely more valuable than just PHP... And yes, having established, stable and valuable clients with big $$ over the long term certainly helps. My personal big issue was that I deliberately dropped all my clients from pre recession times to work on a startup and then had to find new work in 2009, to my dismay discovering that half my old clients either went out of business or couldn't afford me any longer... Keeping relationships up really matters.
  - silencio 17y ago
    Oh huh. That is interesting, because I was always convinced I can never charge too little here when I need a lot of money to begin with to live in such an area. (Just the other day I found out my health insurance company was going to charge me $100/month more...almost making me consider getting a job instead or finishing school...) > Here's the thing with project rates - I'm obsessive with clocking time. I clock everything, every second. I am too ;) I use Billings or Harvest (depending on where I'm working) to time everything obsessively. I don't actually bill anyone based on purely the time, but it gives me a sense of how much time it took me to do certain things because if I end up spending way too much time hand-holding a client then something needs to change. DO NOT get into the habit of not clocking things like responding to client emails (other than like short one liner type things) and whatever, because you are right...it can be a huge time suck, and it's hard to estimate how much time that will end up taking. Whoever originally came up with the idea of quoting in excess of what you really think it is time and money wise was smart ;) > But having Java and Perl skills are definitely more valuable than just PHP... And yes, having established, stable and valuable clients with big $$ over the long term certainly helps. I don't even really know that much Perl...Java I learned in school, I'm trying to do more Cocoa/Mac/iPhone/(iPad?) stuff now that the iPhone has really kicked that off because I wasn't really doing anything with it since I had first played with cocoa/objc in like 2005-6...I know bits and pieces. I usually won't take on a job involving something I don't know much about, but my scattered knowledge does come in handy as I can be extremely flexible in getting things done the way people want them. So yeah, if PHP is your only skill, you should branch out if at least to be qualified for more jobs out there. Established clients are far more important, and I'm sorry to hear that :( I'm trying to work on a startup right now, but it's hard because I have to pay my own bills, cofounder can't quit her job yet, and other such little things... But keeping up relationships, if only to have lunch and say hi, is a good thing to do with your best clients. It's a tough time for everyone right now and has been for a while, don't worry :)
rwhitman 17y ago
One word of advice I'd also like to offer - the pickier you are about the TYPE of project you take the less you're going to make. If there's competition for the project the client can get away with paying less. If you can suck up doing boring backend work for pharmaceutical companies you can ask for much better $$ than working with a seed-level social media startup or a popular blog. There's a tradeoff where your ego lies - in high rates vs putting sexy names in your client roster...

volomike 17y ago

As a fulltime and fairly successful freelancer now going on my third year, I completely agree with rwhitman here. However, I have something else to offer. The original poster needs to stop thinking of freelancing as the only thing he does. He needs passive income and affiliate marketing projects. But that requires free time. My suggestion on getting free time is to take those periods where you do sales/marketing/advertising stints for new gigs, and outsource that to offshore virtual assistants. That gives you a little bit of free time to slip in the start of a project, and then in the next month you can finish it. For ideas on what to do, visit mixergy.com and let your mind wander from there. As for affiliate marketing, just start with the advice on affbuzz.com and move from there.

silencio 17y ago

> But I think it has mostly to do with the economy. I don't think so. The majority of my freelance work is web development, and I bill at least double that - $100 to as much as $300/hr if I can get away with it, and only web development, because I know nothing about design and other things and will freely admit to it. I don't really do anything specialized, I just have a list of former and current clients from the past few years who are all very happy, and nothing fancy there either. New clients are often through word-of-mouth, which I've very much enjoyed as many clients referred to me by a former client that I enjoyed working with are usually a joy to work with as well. Oh, and not so much PHP, but mostly Rails, occasionally weirder stuff (Java, perl!). Note that the hourly rate is not what I usually offer to clients, I give them a project rate based on what they want. People seem to be fine enough paying five figures for a completed project, not so much billed specifically by hours (unless the situation demands such a thing). The only thing that may make a difference here is that I live in Los Angeles, where there are lots of potential clients, the cost of living is cringe-worthy, and to ask too little is to ask for trouble as a freelancer. I very much doubt my web dev skills could pull in that kind of money in, say, somewhere in Montana. And the very extremes of my rate are extremes. $300/hr, if you want me to pull allnighters to get something done in one week. $100 for those super long projects that just drag on forever and you're not actually doing anything significant.. Anyway, if I had a useful suggestion, it would be to stop looking on sites where most of the projects are ridiculously simplistic or skills are undervalued...like craigslist. I used to eye the local jobs via rss of craigslist's software jobs and such, and ugh, it was all listings like "oh we want 10 years exp with x" and offering some ridiculous pittance at best, and "will trade (your skills) for (my...skills?)" at worst. There's some reasonable contract work to be had on like dice.com, and there is nothing quite like networking with your local community and going from there. Be assertive about your hourly rate, but not too much. Anyone that isn't coming to the table with a good budget isn't worth working with in the long term, because they're also the same jerks that'll try to weasel their way out of paying for the extra work they want done and such. But you know your skills and your limits, and your clients need to feel that they got their money's worth out of you. Also, keep in mind that charging more than someone else might really does make people think you're worth it. I don't usually get bundled into the "my next door neighbor's kid can do this website for minimum wage" or "what a ripoff" groups, more like the "this person knows what we need and gets it done right and on time and is worth the expense" group. :p If I lose projects to someone else over the price, so be it. I need to be desperately in need of work to be willing to work on a project while extremely underpaid, and even then I had better still be getting something else in exchange to make it worthwhile. I accept everything from cookies and sushi lunch to some serious credibility gain (i.e. volunteering for a good cause).

rwhitman 17y ago
Interesting, I actually live in LA as well. Here's the thing with project rates - I'm obsessive with clocking time. I clock everything, every second. Sometimes you bid on a project where you say to yourself "oh yea! I'm getting $300/hr for this" but what happens is as it drags on you try to clock less time to justify the rate and just start guesstimating. In reality if you clock meetings, calls, time responding to emails, documentation, research, project planning etc the rate always ends up being much, much lower. Its not just time coding. Anyhow not saying that's your situation, but I think a lot of people who claim high rates forget about non-production hours when they make their project quotes. But having Java and Perl skills are definitely more valuable than just PHP... And yes, having established, stable and valuable clients with big $$ over the long term certainly helps. My personal big issue was that I deliberately dropped all my clients from pre recession times to work on a startup and then had to find new work in 2009, to my dismay discovering that half my old clients either went out of business or couldn't afford me any longer... Keeping relationships up really matters.
- silencio 17y ago
  Oh huh. That is interesting, because I was always convinced I can never charge too little here when I need a lot of money to begin with to live in such an area. (Just the other day I found out my health insurance company was going to charge me $100/month more...almost making me consider getting a job instead or finishing school...) > Here's the thing with project rates - I'm obsessive with clocking time. I clock everything, every second. I am too ;) I use Billings or Harvest (depending on where I'm working) to time everything obsessively. I don't actually bill anyone based on purely the time, but it gives me a sense of how much time it took me to do certain things because if I end up spending way too much time hand-holding a client then something needs to change. DO NOT get into the habit of not clocking things like responding to client emails (other than like short one liner type things) and whatever, because you are right...it can be a huge time suck, and it's hard to estimate how much time that will end up taking. Whoever originally came up with the idea of quoting in excess of what you really think it is time and money wise was smart ;) > But having Java and Perl skills are definitely more valuable than just PHP... And yes, having established, stable and valuable clients with big $$ over the long term certainly helps. I don't even really know that much Perl...Java I learned in school, I'm trying to do more Cocoa/Mac/iPhone/(iPad?) stuff now that the iPhone has really kicked that off because I wasn't really doing anything with it since I had first played with cocoa/objc in like 2005-6...I know bits and pieces. I usually won't take on a job involving something I don't know much about, but my scattered knowledge does come in handy as I can be extremely flexible in getting things done the way people want them. So yeah, if PHP is your only skill, you should branch out if at least to be qualified for more jobs out there. Established clients are far more important, and I'm sorry to hear that :( I'm trying to work on a startup right now, but it's hard because I have to pay my own bills, cofounder can't quit her job yet, and other such little things... But keeping up relationships, if only to have lunch and say hi, is a good thing to do with your best clients. It's a tough time for everyone right now and has been for a while, don't worry :)

rwhitman 17y ago

One word of advice I'd also like to offer - the pickier you are about the TYPE of project you take the less you're going to make. If there's competition for the project the client can get away with paying less. If you can suck up doing boring backend work for pharmaceutical companies you can ask for much better $$ than working with a seed-level social media startup or a popular blog. There's a tradeoff where your ego lies - in high rates vs putting sexy names in your client roster...