4 ms·

I am a freelance dev and I only bill the hours that I work. But I am quite sure a lot of freelance devs just bill 8 hours of work a day, even if they only work

by wsc981 5y ago

I am a freelance dev and I only bill the hours that I work. But I am quite sure a lot of freelance devs just bill 8 hours of work a day, even if they only work 3 hours. My conscience wont allow me to do this in a remote work situation. Back when I worked in the office as freelancer, I did bill 8 hours a day, since I was expected to sit in the office 8 hours a day, regardless if I performed or not. In the past I worked at large and small organizations and I did see it’s generally much easier to slack in large organizations.

poulsbohemian 5y ago
I got to a point where I only offered clients retainer based agreements as I got tired of fighting over hours. Ironically, even when they were being billed by the month they would still try to do these mental gymnastics where they tried to calculate the hourly cost of activities based on rate / hours in a month. It got exhausting. Yes they were often shitty clients. But my point here is, there's a lot of merit in trying to take hours out of the conversation so that I can just get the work done and not have to argue over whether it's going to take me four hours or four hours and fifteen minutes to complete this task.
cheschire 5y ago
I am inferring from your message that some other freelance devs are less conscience-driven than you are. Perhaps that's not what you intended to imply with your statement "my conscience wont allow me..." If that was your intention though, imagine if another freelance dev has performed justifiable calculations that determine their 3 hours of work should be billed at 2.5x your 3 hour rate. How could they possibly compete with you? What if the deliverable was the same? What if the other devs just billed on deliverable instead of hours with strong renegotiation clauses? Would that be more acceptable to you than playing games with the hours just to get passed bean counters?
newsbinator 5y ago
I'm a freelance dev and I agree with Jonathan Stark that hourly billing incentivizes freelancers to inflate estimates and incentivizes clients to commoditize your work and to let scope creep. http://hourlybillingisnuts.com http://hourlybillingisnuts.com Ever since I read his stuff, I've been doing value-pricing, i.e. "here's what we both agree will solve your problem, and here's 3 price options, depending on my level of involvement". Then if I can get it done in an hour or in a year, either way I get paid the same and the client gets what they paid for. Realistic time estimates, though, are a separate matter.

by wsc981 5y ago

poulsbohemian 5y ago

I got to a point where I only offered clients retainer based agreements as I got tired of fighting over hours. Ironically, even when they were being billed by the month they would still try to do these mental gymnastics where they tried to calculate the hourly cost of activities based on rate / hours in a month. It got exhausting. Yes they were often shitty clients. But my point here is, there's a lot of merit in trying to take hours out of the conversation so that I can just get the work done and not have to argue over whether it's going to take me four hours or four hours and fifteen minutes to complete this task.

cheschire 5y ago

I am inferring from your message that some other freelance devs are less conscience-driven than you are. Perhaps that's not what you intended to imply with your statement "my conscience wont allow me..." If that was your intention though, imagine if another freelance dev has performed justifiable calculations that determine their 3 hours of work should be billed at 2.5x your 3 hour rate. How could they possibly compete with you? What if the deliverable was the same? What if the other devs just billed on deliverable instead of hours with strong renegotiation clauses? Would that be more acceptable to you than playing games with the hours just to get passed bean counters?

newsbinator 5y ago

I'm a freelance dev and I agree with Jonathan Stark that hourly billing incentivizes freelancers to inflate estimates and incentivizes clients to commoditize your work and to let scope creep. http://hourlybillingisnuts.com http://hourlybillingisnuts.com Ever since I read his stuff, I've been doing value-pricing, i.e. "here's what we both agree will solve your problem, and here's 3 price options, depending on my level of involvement". Then if I can get it done in an hour or in a year, either way I get paid the same and the client gets what they paid for. Realistic time estimates, though, are a separate matter.