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How did your rates evolve over the last four years? (from when you were a beginner with no experience, until now)? Was it tough justifying high rates with li

by nolite 16y ago

How did your rates evolve over the last four years? (from when you were a beginner with no experience, until now)? Was it tough justifying high rates with little experience?

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
I started at about $50 / hr and now I charge about twice that for smaller projects. For longer-term or larger chunks of work, I give discounts because it saves me time looking for work. The high-risk, high-reward stuff is fixed-price gigs where I charge a set price for the whole project. I've taken a bath on some of these, though never lower than $50 / hr. On the flip side, the good ones have worked out to high hundreds per hour. Stressful, though.
- tocomment 16y ago
  Do you ever get work through recruiters? Do you find their rates to be less? Whenever I get contacted by a recruiter and I tell them my rate they freak out. They say "The customer has a stretch budget of $40/hour for this contract" like that's some huge amount.
  - danmelnick 16y ago
    Here's the thing about those recruiters. Let's say they get a budget of $80/hour for the project. Their goal is to sell it to you for as little as possible so they can take the difference. So they're always lying to you about the customer's budget, because in truth it's about them maximizing their profit. I once had a recruiter offer me $25/hour. I laughed at them and told them to not call me back unless they could do $60, which at the time was my rate. They called back about 15 minutes later and said the client had increased the budget and they could do $60.
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I've landed two gigs with recruiters at about $75 / hr, and I've made it clear that I'll be raising my rates after several months, assuming things are working out. I think it just depends on the type of work you're doing. I would imagine iOS, Rails, Django, and anything other than PHP would probably be more.
    - nolite 16y ago
      are you doing php only?

by nolite 16y ago

How did your rates evolve over the last four years? (from when you were a beginner with no experience, until now)? Was it tough justifying high rates with little experience?

ryanwaggoner 16y ago

I started at about $50 / hr and now I charge about twice that for smaller projects. For longer-term or larger chunks of work, I give discounts because it saves me time looking for work. The high-risk, high-reward stuff is fixed-price gigs where I charge a set price for the whole project. I've taken a bath on some of these, though never lower than $50 / hr. On the flip side, the good ones have worked out to high hundreds per hour. Stressful, though.

tocomment 16y ago
Do you ever get work through recruiters? Do you find their rates to be less? Whenever I get contacted by a recruiter and I tell them my rate they freak out. They say "The customer has a stretch budget of $40/hour for this contract" like that's some huge amount.
- danmelnick 16y ago
  Here's the thing about those recruiters. Let's say they get a budget of $80/hour for the project. Their goal is to sell it to you for as little as possible so they can take the difference. So they're always lying to you about the customer's budget, because in truth it's about them maximizing their profit. I once had a recruiter offer me $25/hour. I laughed at them and told them to not call me back unless they could do $60, which at the time was my rate. They called back about 15 minutes later and said the client had increased the budget and they could do $60.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I've landed two gigs with recruiters at about $75 / hr, and I've made it clear that I'll be raising my rates after several months, assuming things are working out. I think it just depends on the type of work you're doing. I would imagine iOS, Rails, Django, and anything other than PHP would probably be more.
  - nolite 16y ago
    are you doing php only?