4 ms·
When freelancing I tend to work a simple system. £250: An update to content - an evening or two's work. £500: A tiny static site with some original desig
by sambeau 15y ago
When freelancing I tend to work a simple system.
£250: An update to content - an evening or two's work.
£500: A tiny static site with some original design. <5 pages
£1000: A full static site for a SME. Full Design. ~5 pages.
£2500: As above with some dynamic elements. ~10 pages.
£5000: Medium dynamic site. ~20 pages. 2-4 weeks work.
I then slide upwards for jobs I don't want and down for people I like. I've never gone above £5000 for a 'homer'.
I also have a mate-rates scale that appears below this:
Free: Family. Charities I like. Updates + tiny static.
Bottle of Wine: As above but close family friends.
Bottle of Whiskey: As above but good friends.
If I get a request for a bigger job from friends or family I tend to pass them on to a developer chum these days — experience has shown it's for the best.
Having a fixed, doubling scale like this works well. Each next price needs to be big enough to make a difference to me as I am essentially very lazy and I like my free time. Also, I am a terrible soft-touch and would probably charge everyone mates-rates if I didn't force myself to do this.
- anons2011 15y agoSounds very reasonable, I am definitely going to up my rates, but if you've worked with someone before with cheaper rates, how do I try and up my rates? As for a dynamic site, I mainly use Wordpress as my CMS of choice, usually great for clients as they find it pretty straight forward to go in and add/update content, add pages etc. Another thing I have found now that I am working full-time is the absolute top-most importance for proper functional specs, as well as proper bug tracking software, emailing constant changes gets to be a real pain, and pretty hard for you to track which ones have actually been done.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- airlocksoftware 15y agoYou tell the clients that you have been working with that due to an increase in demand for your time, you have had to raise your rates. Simple economics. If they decide they don't want to work with you anymore, well, that's ok. You don't have any sort of obligation to continue to offer your services at the same rate.
- mtogo 15y agoWhoa dude, $392.10 for you to just change content on a site? Set up a CMS and let the client change it themselves.
- brk 15y agoGood suggestion, but many people are happy to pay someone to do a task which they have no interest in, and the process of which may be highly foreign to them. I've seen plenty of folks use a CMS to completely botch up their site, suck up 6 hours of their time, and end up worse off than when they started. If someone is making continual changes, the CMS makes sense. If it is a business that does 1 or 2 updates per year, it might be better to outsource the web stuff.
- xorglorb 15y agoA CMS brings in additional complexity of updates and security breaches, which can cost much more than a $400 update fee a few times a year.
- sambeau 15y agoExactly. Some of these sites are hosted on my own server. After having numerous PHP sites hacked (and my machine wiped twice) static html is the only thing I trust these days.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ChrisLTD 15y agoContent changes could require new CSS styles (which would require a new round of cross browser testing), image editing, and cleaning up mal-formed text from an email or Word doc. You also need to factor in how much you should charge to make it worth your time to come up with an estimate, fire off an invoice, etc.
- sambeau 15y agoI've had little success with CMSs. People find them too complicated and I end up either holding their hand, fixing their mistakes or just doing the update. For free. How much do you value your evenings at? £250 would be 1-2 evenings. One evening and it seems like reasonably easy money. Two evenings and suddenly its not quite so generous. Surely any technical person can charge $50 an hour? My day job charges me out at $1000 a day. I have also found that when it is an amount less than that I tend to resent the fact that I've had to give up an evening. Stand up for yourself. Charge an amount that makes you happy.