49 ms·

Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

• kache_ 4y ago
  time to quit my fang job l m a o
  • fxtentacle 4y ago
    Fang is for comfortable and reliable cash, not for the highest possible salary at the highest possible stress level.
  • prismatix 4y ago
    Keep in mind that contractors don't receive benefits (health care, dental, etc) and have to pay about 30% in taxes. So in reality, the pay is about equal once you factor in that.
    • kache_ 4y ago
      I live in Canada & I've done the spreadsheet math. I can probably ~triple my salary if I go balls to the walls. Insurance is a drop in the bucket (I can just outright buy my drugs). I'm just kinda comfy where I'm at, and I'm having fun at my job.
      • swader999 4y ago
        Agree, I've never seen a benefit package that gets me excited. With our health care system here, the FTE jobs are a lot less compelling vs the contractor route. About 1/20 that go the FTE equity route seem to hit the jackpot.
        • xcambar 4y ago
          Freelancing is as stressful as it can get. No matter where you are an FTE, freelance will get you much further in terms of stress.
          • hnick 4y ago
            Some people are just unable to stop. My wife was like that in her small business. Her mindset was something like: I can't watch TV, I'm wasting money I could be earning. Even if there's no work right now, you can always do business development. It can become a trap.
          • swader999 4y ago
            I gain security and confidence in my employment by knowing the code base, the stack and the business domain. I pick projects that are core to the success of the company. In twenty five years, I was only laid off once and in that case, 18 of 20 were let go in 2008 when an engineering firm lost all their work.
• bhu1st 4y ago
  I'm from South Asia. I offer end to end web development, SEO and digital marketing. I charge $50/hr.
• galfarragem 4y ago
  I've read somewhere (paraphrased): "Money problems are usually self-confidence problems." The more I think about it, the more I believe it is not far from reality.
• rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  Project management, execution or consultation, $40/day.
• leto_ii 4y ago
  In Amsterdam NL a backend engineer could expect 80-100 euros/hr. > 100 is also possible, but you may get into specialization territory.
  • b0m 4y ago
    Where would one go and look for those kind of vacancies?
    • wodenokoto 4y ago
      You either connect to a freelance broker or you network your way into such things. In my experience no advertises on job boards that they are looking for contractors.
      • handzhiev 4y ago
        And where do you find freelance brokers?
    • leto_ii 4y ago
      I think in the beginning recruiters on LinkedIn. Note however that like all parasites they will try to skim a lot off the top. Worse than that, some will try to lock you in and write in clauses saying that they should get a share of any other future contracts you might have - make sure to never sign smth like that. Once you have a few 6 month contracts under your belt and you can get good references you can probably find things without relying on intermediaries.
  • wofo 4y ago
    Also based in NL, "Amsterdam" area (Utrecht). As people have mentioned elsewhere, it depends. My current long-term (6+ months) contract is at €95/hr, working as part of a great team of developers on an Elixir backend, and being able to learn Elixir (which I didn't know beforehand) on the job. I have also done smaller projects (2 months), a bit more specialized, on the side for €125/hr. By the way, I am not totally convinced about weekly vs hourly billing. In my case, hourly billing has worked well. I just make sure I bill for _everything_ I do for the client, also the time I spend learning stuff, and communicate clearly about it. People hire me because I can figure out stuff quickly, not because I know all there is to know about programming (though I do think I have a strong background).
• ccvannorman 4y ago
  I recommend Weekly Rate Consulting[0] About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed the first proposal. You're probably worth more than you think. Specialization can increase your rate, but business sense, communication, and ability to articulate and contribute value at the executive level is a 10x difference. [0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed the first proposal. Doubling your rate is really only an option when you’re already charging too little or if you’re dealing with clients who have no idea what market rate actually is. I encourage everyone to explore incrementally higher rates until they are losing deals over pricing. That’s the only way to really know the ceiling. The other important thing to keep in mind is that higher rates bring higher expectations. I’ve had contractors who charges in the $100/hr range and delivered okay-but-not-great work with mediocre communication. We kept them on because they could deliver eventually and we felt like we got what we paid for. If they doubled their rates to $200 the first thing I’d do is wind down the contract and switch to any number of more diligent and qualified contractors I know who charge in that range. As soon as you violate the client’s sense of “you get what you pay for”, the relationship is in trouble. If someone doubles their rates, they need to be prepared to deliver work and communication deserving of that rate. There are a number of contractors in my area who have reputations of charging expensive rates but delivering budget quality work. They’re mostly limited to new clients at smaller companies who don’t have enough of a network to check their reputation. However, if you can increase rates and deliver quality work that matches the price, you could work yourself into a premium market segment. And that’s a good place to be!
    • lumost 4y ago
      You just highlighted why doubling the rates might work for many people. If you charge $100/hr, the client may simply assume you can't handle the higher level/harder work. If you potentially can.. then doubling the rate will make the client feel comfortable giving it to you. The same pattern happens in salaried work, A manager needs to show that the expensive new senior hire was worth the money. So they give the new hire all the good projects and leave the (cheaper) current employees high and dry. Further, management is incentivized to show the new hire's work in a positive light during performance review as they would be admitting that the manager made a mistake otherwise. Understanding this dynamic will make you happier at work. Sometimes you need to leave so that you can be the great new hire, sometimes you need to demand more money/promotion so that management sees your worth. People inherently assume that you are worth something approximating your salary.
• vilius 4y ago
  I’m also curious what’s a good way finding projects for generalists. My contracting experience was that I ended up doing specialized work even though I would able to complete the project from start to finish.
  • davedx 4y ago
    Startups! They love generalists.
    • JoshTriplett 4y ago
      The downside of a startup is that they don't have as much money to pay you, and as a contractor you don't get equity. (On the upside, you don't get equity, and for most startups the money they pay you will be worth more than any equity ever will be.)
      • Silhouette 4y ago
        They don't have money at first. The ones who hit product-market fit and then want to scale quickly used to be a gold mine for good generalists though. A few startups are run by veterans of several previous adventures who can spot when the real game is about to kick off and it's time to ramp up hiring. But almost no-one without that prior experience can hire a bigger permanent team as fast as they want to during that period of rapid growth. Also these companies often have relatively inexperienced teams as they start to scale just because of the earlier budget limitations. They benefit from having some more experienced hands on deck for a while to stop them making dumb mistakes and help them train up their early hires who stick around and suddenly find themselves operating a level or two up the ladder as the head count grows.
• joshmanders 4y ago
  I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff as a single person. My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.
  • TruthWillHurt 4y ago
    I'm assuming you do Frontend? What else? What frameworks would you suggest? I feel I could definitely build a project myself, but I find FE to be very time consuming.
    • joshmanders 4y ago
      I do it all. Have for 25 years. Frontend is actually my weakest skillset (but I'm still awesome at it)
  • kishinmanglani 4y ago
    How do you usually find clients?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • joshmanders 4y ago
      100% word of mouth and when I was looking, the "Freelancers to be hired" monthly threads here have brought in a ton of money for me too.
  • ryanSrich 4y ago
    This is a great rate. I’d love to know how you find clients willing to pay this amount. Most people I’ve come across that need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like $10,000…total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.
    • scrollaway 4y ago
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  $2k per day. hourly always invites discussions, for example how are phone calls with mixed topics billed?
  • typeofhuman 4y ago
    I'm considering switching from hourly to a daily model. Tracking hours is becoming too granular for the work I'm doing. This includes research and development; each of which I find myself "guessing" the hours a lot of the time.
    • fxtentacle 4y ago
      In my case, it was the research. If you bill 2h of DuckDuck-ing for suitable libraries to use as dependencies, that sounds like you're slacking off. But it'll probably save money for the project as a whole.
  • furyofantares 4y ago
    i assume that invites a discussion about what a day is. is that an easier discussion? how does it go? or does it not invite discussion?
    • fxtentacle 4y ago
      Never had that discussion. When I assign a day to a project, it basically means that I promise to not work on something else on that calendar day. But the actual hours don't matter that much if I get some stuff done. I mean regular employees also can have a bad day where they can't concentrate well and then you only get 4 hours of productive work out of the 8 hours they are physically present.
    • Silhouette 4y ago
      This is a bit like the clients with low rates or clients with high rates discussion. Clients who will pay high rates actually tend to be more respectful of your time and expertise. Similarly a chargeable day is a day when you provided the contracted services period. It doesn't come with fixed hours or even a fixed amount of hours. It doesn't come with a guarantee that you won't take a quick call with someone else in the middle of the day or a two-hour lunch date. It does include travel, phone calls, answering "quick questions" on Teams or Slack or whatever they use, and anything else you do to provide the contracted services. Anyone who doesn't like that can find someone else to work with who is willing to put up with all the other nickel and dime stuff that client will surely try. No-one I worked with on a day rate ever even questioned it. What you get done on the days you charge for will tell a client soon enough if you're providing the value they're paying for and if you are then they won't have any reason to worry about nit-picking the wording in your contract.
• plantain 4y ago
  $120US for work I think will be interesting or rewarding, scaling to $300US for work that sounds like it's going to suck.
• typeofhuman 4y ago
  Southeast USA. $100/hr for everything (meetings, development work, bug fixes, ...). Took me a while to be honest with myself and finally charge for all of my time. Maybe it's confidence? Never had an issue from a client with this arrangement.
  • mgbmtl 4y ago
    I tell clients that identifying the problem is at least 50% of the work, and that includes meetings. Well, I call them "work sessions", and I don't think it's an euphemism. And then they can pay 100 hours for a narrow scope of perfect, or they can pay 20 hours and iterate until it's good enough (bugfixes).
    • rebuilder 4y ago
      Is it controversial that meetings should count as billable time? I mean, it’s not like you’re there because you just really like meetings!
      • nathancahill 4y ago
        I bill double for meetings. Suddenly was invited to a lot less meetings that I never needed to be in as a contractor. Perfection.
        • wpietri 4y ago
          This is genius and I wish I had read this comment a long time ago.
        • swader999 4y ago
          There's no way my wife will go for that.
      • ncallaway 4y ago
        We bill for project management and work related meetings, but not contract and business development related meetings. So if we’re getting feedback for our performance, ways we can improve, or discussing a contract extension we don’t bill for those. But if we’re discussing the thing we’re building, or doing project status updates we bill for that. We’ve never had a client push back on that.
• zackify 4y ago
  125/hr
• cgfloat 4y ago
  OOC, do you have a link to the question from a couple of days ago?
  • redbell 4y ago
    Here it is.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606348
• bubblehack3r 4y ago
  I'm a cyber security specialist (in web application security) with a few certifications and 10+ years of experience. I charge usually $350 an hour unless it's something I estimate will require the help of an outsider to which I may go as high at $1k an hour. Answering everyone asking how we find clients - I love public speaking and so I try to do as much as I can. 80% of my clients saw me speak, the other 20% come from word to mouth. Highly recommend if you have the ability.
  • PaulWaldman 4y ago
    How long are your engagements?
    • bubblehack3r 4y ago
      They can go anywhere from one hour (e.g awareness training) to a full month (e.g complex web application pentest)
      • PaulWaldman 4y ago
        Ironically, I've found it's easier to charge higher rates for longer engagements.
        • bubblehack3r 4y ago
          Although I charge a flat fee, I've found that companies tend to be more accepting to my pricing when it's a longer engagement than a shorter one
          • orzig 4y ago
            Yeah, the fixed “cost“ (in effort) of bringing someone in can totally dominate the financial cost for smaller engagements. Especially when a manager is spending their large company’s dollars.
      • ryanSrich 4y ago
• revskill 4y ago
  Mine is 40$/hourly as a Fullstack JS developer (React + Node)
• francis-io 4y ago
  in the uk, everyone wants to work on daily rates. 600pd-650pd as a devops engineer. So, £75, or $86 an hour. This is 5 days a week, 40 hours a week. I bill around £14k a month and after taxes i walk away with about £7k a month.
  • sgjohnson 4y ago
    > I bill around £14k a month and after taxes i walk away with about £7k a month. You should employ some sort of a tax-reduction strategy. Paying 50% of your gross in direct taxes is absolutely batshit crazy. I used to contract for £350-450 per day as a PHP backend dev and paid an effective 30% tax rate. Which is still crazy insane high, but it's not 50%. Does your 50% figure includes VAT? Because if that's not VAT inclusive, you're doing something horribly wrong. Inside IR35?
    • tekkk 4y ago
      If that's net after pension and everything it's not really that surprising. In Finland for example the employee pension rate is 25% of gross. Then tax and employer insurance on top of that and you're left with about half of the total paid sum. Of course, as independent contractor you can set your own pension rate as low as you want but that's a different debate.
      • sgjohnson 4y ago
        Virtually all contractors in the UK are operating through a LLC and paying themselves in dividends, so there's no pension at all, and legally they are not even employees of their businesses (because board members can provide the business with whatever services without being employees). If you go through PAYE, you make yourself an employee, and you must pay yourself a pension. But going through PAYE is a net loss, because then you also have to pay national insurance not only on your side, but also on the employers' side. Paying NI if you can perfectly legally avoid paying it is stupid.
        • tekkk 4y ago
• ents 4y ago
  95/hr, doing "web stuff" for small businesses
  • cutler 4y ago
    95 what? £, $, Euros?
  • aloner 4y ago
    What kind of a web stuff are you doing, internal tools, SAAS, homepages for companies? Are you specialized in a specific stack?
• helloguillecl 4y ago
  I charge 75 EUR per hour but my main client is very loyal (15 years working together), pays on time (24 hours) and I might soon become a business partner. I de design, backend in PHP test and do server administration of a PMS for hotel.
• bfgoodrich 4y ago
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I have a 'rack rate' which is for anything short. That comes down for larger projects - say 10% for 500 hours, 15% for 1000 hours and so on.
• cogwheel 4y ago
  Have an annual salary in mind for a similar role, chop off the last three zeros, and that's my hourly rate. It works out to approximately double which is just enough to account for things you would normally get from an employer: - payroll taxes (SS/Medicare) - PTO/sick days - equipment & supplies - training/conferences - health insurance - retirement savings Etc
  • wpietri 4y ago
    Yes! Long ago I read a book that mentioned that freelance professionals (accountants, lawyers, etc) tended to bill around 1000 hours per year. That the unbillable time went toward sales, client relations, marketing, learning, etc. I could usually do a little better than a 50% utilization rate for myself, but as you say that money goes to things most people don't have to pay. So the knock-three-zeros-off-salary rule served me well.
    • JoshTriplett 4y ago
      Common advice is to double your effective hourly rate when going from salary to contracting (which "divide annual salary by 1000" is equivalent to). That's not just because you'll have fewer hours or have to search for clients; some clients will pay you for all the hours you can give them. But also, you'll have to bring your own health insurance, pay the additional self-employment tax, maintain a business, do business taxes, and quite a bit of other overhead. The additional cost helps offset all of that.
    • okaram 4y ago
      Keep in mind it's not really 50%, more like 65? 2,000 hours means you work 40 hours/week, 50 weeks ... Basically no vacation, just a few holidays or sick days. We budget full time as 1,600 hours
      • wpietri 4y ago
        Depends on the people, I'm sure. For a long time 40-hour weeks with two weeks off was pretty standard in the US, which works out to a nice round 2000 hours. A lot of the people prone to going independent are the types to put in more time than that. I sure am. But yes, if you want fewer working hours, that changes the calculations.
• conderr99 4y ago
  I have 12 years of experience working as a backend engineer full time for medium-to-large sized software companies, and breaking into consulting has always seemed really difficult to me. I mostly excel at system architecture and writing technical documents to describe the trade offs of those systems. I really don’t enjoy full stack/web programming or marketing - is it possible to consult in strictly this capacity? e.g. as a principal or higher level engineer?
  • rtlfe 4y ago
    I don't know about doing it on your own, but you could certainly join a consulting firm and do that role alongside a team of more junior people.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• davedx 4y ago
  About 100 dollars/hour, depending on the client I’m “full stack”, also experienced with C++ and various other stuff
• Arubis 4y ago
  I’m not sure if I qualify as generalist, but this should still be relevant: It depends. Did I go through an agency, or find the client myself? Do they need _me_ or a butt in a seat? Will the work be fun, or awful, or is there any on-call expectation (which is worse than awful and probably a hard no)? Discounts for bulk and prepayment. Also, hourly rates are the worst. Value pricing is a hard leap; a much easier thing you can do today is at least bump to a flat day rate, or a weekly one of the shape of your clients makes it seamless. Just do it; it’ll make you a happier, saner person and immediately mitigate a terrible incentive misalignment.
  • wpietri 4y ago
    I think incentives are misaligned either way. You have to match the structure to the situation. I have a friend, a great sydadmin/devops/infrastructure person. He never takes full-time jobs; his deal is always for 32 hours/week. His reasoning? 32 hours is 32 hours, but full time is all the time. He leads a much happier life than most ops-ish people I know. Maybe you have the sort of clients where day/weekly rates work. But for the sort of client that has crunch mode or deadline rushes, there is no way in the world I'd give them a weekly rate. If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out in time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want them to feel the pain when they see the bills.
    • ehnto 4y ago
      > If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out in time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want them to feel the pain when they see the bills. That's a great point, maybe a way to mitigate that is a combination in your contract of a weekly rate + hours cap, and then just really good communication on time you're spending. But I must admit, that ruins one of the incentives for weekly billing for me, and that is not having to atomically track time and nickle and dime every little task.
      • wpietri 4y ago
        It definitely depends on the client. If the team is crunching to hit a deadline and I'm saying, "Sorry, I'm at my weekly cap, so I'm leaving early today and won't be joining you this weekend; see you on Monday" then I'd be surprised to be invited back for the next project. I certainly wouldn't expect to be given any important work. But I also feel you on time tracking, so I think a weekly rate is great if the client's culture is such that there's a natural cap and it's a good match for the work.
• i_dont_know_ 4y ago
  I generally bill around $175/hr to make whatever technology problems you have work out :) (Note I'm based out of Europe, though, reading some of the stuff here I should probably charge more anyways) That's my generalized rate when the person paying me is non-technical and the actual work involved isn't clear or known to them ahead of time. I spend part of the time coming up with a plan so they know what's going to happen, of course, and coming up with estimates. If it's a technical person or the problem is better-defined, then I charge different 'specialist' rates that vary based on the task and the rough 'market rate' for such a task. Sometimes, also, it's just an unusually fun task or a task for a nonprofit or something, in which case I work with their budget and my intrinsic motivation and try to come up with something fair.
• brankoB 4y ago
  In Canada, $80/hr. Aiming for $90 for my next contract starting next month. Or to move to the US and make way more, apparently.
  • swader999 4y ago
    In Canada too but long term multi year international contract leading small dev team. $150/hr 40 hours week.
    • prakashn27 4y ago
      How do you get 150$ per hour contract in Canada ?
• jordanf 4y ago
  12,500 / week for general work (design, prototyping, sometimes building). Startups won't pay this, but large firms will.
  • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
    Are you paid primarily for product design, graphic design or engineering? That's a killer trifecta of skills. It reminds me of some advice from Scott Adams: "Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."
  • cutler 4y ago
    Currency?
• tyurok 4y ago
  Generalist can be a specialization in itself. Imagine someone that can do a bit of front-end, backend, infra, design, would be a specialist in bootstrapping a startup. Don't get too attached to market/industry defined roles. Another way to raise rates is to take risks (like deadlines, promises) but every person had their own risk profile.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Or change the language. Instead of 'generalist', sell yourself as a senior developer, architect, lead developer, etc. Nobody asks "what programming language are you an architect in", because the job is supposed to be much broader than that.
    • tyurok 4y ago
      Yeah, poliglots are difficult to find as well, maybe not as in actual difficulty to be but more of a preference for a subset of techs.
  • leetrout 4y ago
    Excluding design this is me and what I enjoy doing. I named my operation "engine ignite" because I like helping startups start. I LOVE getting folks leveled up on team process and procedure to support SOC2 and such.
    • tyurok 4y ago
      It's a fairly rare set of skills. People in these positive usually are bad in most of them and it becomes harder to ramp up the team later (mentoring, quality).
  • throwaway74829 4y ago
    Have you gone down this route? I think the biggest issue deep generalists fall into is that they can be above average in the entire stack, but not exceptional enough to make the cut for a specialized role in any single thing (i.e the vast majority of publicly advertised roles). Going down “specialized in boot-strapping startups” route is an interesting remedy. I would imagine the only way to find these opportunities is word of mouth.
• gmanis 4y ago
• leetrout 4y ago
  $150/hr for small (<= 10 hour) projects but I did lower my upwork to $90 before the pandemic to try and see if it got me any inbound leads (it did not). $4000/week with no Fridays for bigger contracts. It usually gets negotiated down for startups and non-profits.
• klapaucjusz 4y ago
  I charge $150/hr. for new work and do pretty much exclusively hourly-based work. I have many clients that I grandfather on lower rates. The second half of this equation is how many billable hours you can get as freelancer in a week. Plenty of the things I do are not billable, and the more different small contracts I'm working on the less billable hours I'm able to fit in. I would say I average 20-25 hours billable on a regular work week of 40-ish hours.
• k__ 4y ago
  Depends on how fast I work.
• jwmoz 4y ago
  £500pd this was 4 years ago though. Decent rate at the time.
• de_freelance_1 4y ago
  In Germany - 100€/hour. Billing on average 150 hours each month.
• koevet 4y ago
  My rate is 1000 Euro/day. There is flexibility on the rate, if the project is particularly interesting.
  • factorialboy 4y ago
    What do you offer for that rate?
    • koevet 4y ago
      I'm quite a generalist, my strongest expertise is the JVM ecosystem, but these days I'm helping clients to migrate to cloud infra.
  • swader999 4y ago
    Any thoughts or concerns on how to deal with inflationary environment and the falling Euro?
    • koevet 4y ago
      I'm based in Germany, so the tax pressure is quite high, thinking of moving back to Italy (where I'm originally from) to benefit of the massive tax break for "returning Italians" (or anti brain drain tax advantages).
      • jokethrowaway 4y ago
        It's not that great, you still have to pay social insurance. It's been a long time since I checked but you end up paying 30-35%. In Europe your best options are Malta (5% corp tax + progressive rates on what you spend and keep everything in the company until you leave and withdraw at 0% from eg. Dubai) or Cyprus (12 corp tax +2.5% dividends tax). I'd consider Montenegro as well if it makes sense for you or other eastern European countries.
• ykevinator2 4y ago
  There are 100 clients who expect to pay $15 / hour for every one who will pay $125. It's really really hard to find them but you will find them if you ask 101 potential clients.
• corobo 4y ago
  £75/hr was my last freelance rate for some PHP dev work I did. Got a few too many plates spinning at the moment though so only doing oldschool Linux sysadmin stuff (pets vs cattle) outside the day job. I'd probably bill cheaper for that as it's less of a time sink and the tasks are either easy fixes or interesting.
  • cutler 4y ago
    Why charge less for something that's interesting? The client gets the same value whether it interests you or not.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • corobo 4y ago
      Because I'm desperate for the money and solving an interesting problem is the closest thing to feeling happy I'll do this year. If just one financial plate falls down I'm homeless. It is what it is.
• hakanderyal 4y ago
  I build web apps from start to finish by myself (architecture, design, development, database, servers, marketing page etc.). I bill $500/day, but do project based billing, with 50% payment up-front, 25% on first preview, and 25% on delivery. For improvements and new features on existing projects, I estimate the avg. monthly work and we do monthly retainer agreements. I usually work with seed stage startups (usually referred to me by the angel investors) or bootstrapped B2B tech companies acting as their dev. team. My rate is lower than others mentioned in this thread, but I live in Turkey, which compared to EU/USA, has very low cost of living, and this rates allow me to live comfortably. That said, after doing this for 10+ years, I'm finally pivoting to creating my own SaaS products, and stopped accepting new clients and slowing down the works with existing clients.
  • joshmn 4y ago
    When you come back around to missing client work, remember that some guy on HN begged you to raise your rate. Doesn't matter where you are located. value == value; value != location.
    • hakanderyal 4y ago
      I totally agree that value != location, but clients' budgets absolutely depends on the location. I only work with local clients, and my rates are on the expensive sides of the scale. For comparison, my rates are about 25 times of minimum wage. I know that I could make more working internationally, but I was happy in my comfort zone. If my indie maker/single founder adventure doesn't work out (happened in the past), I'll keep your advice in mind.
      • hnick 4y ago
        Yeah it's worth keeping in mind value != money, either.
    • nevi-me 4y ago
      Sometimes you're limited to local work. I contracted for a while, a few times when I got US based gigs, they'd raise my rate to what's acceptable for them, which was often way more than my local rate. If I tried to use that rate locally, I'd likely not get much work. A good analogy was from a real estate agent recently. She had 2 apartments of same size in a complex, one had been vacant for 2 months, and one had just become available. She said that the owner of the vacant one wasn't willing to lower their rent, and every month that the apartment remains vacant is an 8% loss to their short-term annual rental. The one that had become recently avaiable got a tenant in days, because even though it's better, its owner offered the same as the first vacant one. So I'd often consider time to next gig and take shorter term jobs at low rates so I'm not idle.
• joshmn 4y ago
  Ten-some years ago I started at $100/hour and I thought that was a good idea. "Great, I'll make $200k a year and pay 45% in taxes, that's fine, I can live on that." I thought that being attractive to more people was a better way to find clients. I didn't have a problem finding clients, but they were clients that I didn't see panning out — they gave me vibes of being poor executors. I looked for a way to filter out these "app idea bros" as I called them. The first thing I did was change my rate to $150/hour. Again, I didn't have a problem finding clients; they were still the clients that I didn't see panning out, though. I kept increasing it until I got three prospects in a row that had huge concerns paying what I was asking: granted, it as a lot more than anyone should ever pay for any skillset that wasn't life or death, but it helped me find a balance. Eventually I settled on $375/hour, prepaid, and prepaid weekly. I still have no problem finding clients, but the quality of client has significantly increased. I also now am much more happy to filter clients out — I let them know that, too. I rarely negotiate on it. I'll negotiate on scope (time), or really narrow focus so that my value can be had in a much more focused manner. Before, my marketable skill was "developer, with business chops". My acumen has evolved, sure, so my marketable skills have too. But how I approach it has changed greatly. My value prop is quite extensive: I am a one-stop shop for all things idea, from both a business and product standpoint. I contribute at the executive level, I build the product, I share fifty ways that a product could fail and find new ways that it could succeed. Most importantly, though, I tell clients what they don't need, and I don't spare any time to do so. "Well, my friend said that they use AWS and Kubernetes, don't we need that to scale?", to which I reply, "Cool, I'm happy for them, but you don't need it, no; $PaaS is fine until you reach their limits and it starts becoming a problem — you have three paying customers who are operating off your hacked-together MVP; thus, it's not a problem. Please, do yourself a favor and stop talking to friends about what they use and go talk to customers and potential customers while I'm building this." This builds trust, and is the most important tool in my bag of tricks: not my background in Ruby development, not how productive I am, not my experience in having already solved seemingly 99.9% of the problems people face in building and scaling web apps. Those are all superficial and nice-to-haves. Trust is the most important thing I sell, followed by my ability to say "no". The practical and tangible experience in design, development, systems, content, email campaigns, copy, branding... my clients could hire anyone to do those things better than I could — people can specialize in it. I specialize in saying no, and, while the jury is still out on this, I haven't quite been proven completely wrong yet — and one of my biggest kinks is being wrong. I miss client work. It was stressful at times, and at times kind of lonely. I've pivoted to other things to build skillsets that were practical, but I still find myself picking up the odd job here and there.
• hansvm 4y ago
  When I was early in my career I spitballed $180/hr as something they'd surely try to negotiate. The client jumped at the opportunity. I've been employed normally since then, but I imagine the market rate is substantially higher.
• fifafu 4y ago
  Germany, mostly doing iOS, macOS native (Objc & Swift), Android (Kotlin), Hybrid (Ionic/Capacitor) & Web (Angular + React). ~ 10 years of experience. Working with lots of low level communication protocols for controlling industrial field devices from native apps or web apps. However I never decline a project based on technology and have done all sort of other things as well. I usually charge 120€ per hour (working mostly for big german companies). Currently mostly helping various international teams of my clients and not doing much dev work myself anymore. Usually my contracts are at least 500 hours. However I do this in addition to my own software projects that sell pretty well. This gives me the flexibility to decline any customer project I don’t like. (Or if they want me to do scrum)
• agumonkey 4y ago
  Do you guys charge the same rate no matter the task ? if a customer wants a quickfix or some trivial change do you adapt ? On the other side of the spectrum, if you spend way longer than thought on a feature, do you stop charging or do you consider your work is still worth for them ?
  • hakanderyal 4y ago
    I only work on the products I've built myself. Bug fixes are always free, even if the project has been delivered years ago. Trivial changes are sometimes free if I have a good relationship with the client. Mostly I group the work for a day and charge my daily rate. For the 2nd question, if it's a fixed budget project, I bear the cost myself and take it as a lesson for the future to do estimates better. If it's not, I always inform the client that it might take a longer than the estimates if it's not something I've done before.
    • agumonkey 4y ago
      Thanks a lot for your input :)
• jessecurry 4y ago
  Between $175 and $400/hr depending on the type of work, length of engagement, and interest in the project.
• hnthrow29475792 4y ago
  I’d actually go at a different argument than generalist versus specialist, some fairly commonly heard wisdom in UK was if you were risk-tolerant you could “always make more contracting”. What you also hear is “charge more”. I would instead say to both of those things that one should seek to understand where they want to be in 5-10 years, earning what and doing what? A lot of these threads do boil down to the few making $350 per hour, the many making $100 per hour, and both cohorts seeking to make more. I can’t actually tell you how to do that while contracting, I can tell you my story and perhaps it will help someone :-) I pursued contract roles for a few years typically resulting in me making £100-250k gross per annum range, typically billing at £1000/day or £15-20k/month and optimizing UK tax using all the usual and perfectly legal means. That’s a good income and my family had an okay standard of living. These roles were anything from software development to systems engineering, mostly a “make problems go away” situation - clear connection for the client to business value. I worked for everything from US startups through to UK financial services. Before that I’d done some full-time roles with big and small companies typically in the £80-150k range. Striking out as a contractor was partly the desire to try something new and partly a particularly interesting opportunity arose. Eventually, I ended up going back to what I’d still consider generalist roles with larger FAANG or FAANG-adjacent employers, that’s something of a “loss of freedom” versus contracting, the nature of growing a “career” with them (not the same employer necessarily, just the same set of companies). For me, long term goals were twofold: 1. To have interesting work and problems to solve, ideally to engage with smart people; 2. To make money, lots of money, I’d like to retire at some point, and I’d like my standard of living to be high, I’d like to never really worry about money. In outcome terms, making that jump back to FTE and “getting in the door” of FAANG, which took effort both to get in and then to excel in the new roles, it has paid off in ways where generalist consulting could never take me, I relocated, now take roles that are FAANG or FAANG-adjacent executive-level roles in “Engineering”, these involving a multi-disciplinary mix of duties — Product, Software and Program Management, the full spectrum of working out what the customer needs and what that means for the business, building that technology often with a large team, enabling the field to sell it, feedback loops to improve it. I’ve had several years of W-2 employment in the $2-4M USD range, that’s >10x from contracting rates, achieved in <10 years and I’m on track to punch my retirement ticket around 43 years old and then only work for interest, not for money. In my humble opinion, it is much harder to sell yourself as a contractor when applying to FTE roles (particularly those at bigger companies) and to tell the story in ways a Hiring Manager will appreciate and see your value. Therefore you really need to consider whether the “hustle life” of contracting is something you want to do through retirement, what’s it mean for you when 35+ or even 45+ and is it setting you up for the endgame you want in life?
• dmje 4y ago
  Everyone here is so incredibly focused on money as the primary motivator, which I guess given the thread question makes some sense. But I'd like to just put in a little word for money not being everything, and client type / work type actually being a really important part of the equation. HN is a forum where increasingly I see posts every single day about the high level of misery in tech / how can I get out of this rat race / high levels of stress / undervalued / etc etc. I charge £500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the rates on here, but I work with lovely, interesting clients in the non-profit sector. My clients love what they do and I do good work for them so they love what I do. I have long term, low stress, friendship-like relationships with my clients, not shouty / nasty / high stress ones. I've done this work for 12 years, and had to work with maybe a handful of assholes during that time. FWIW I think there is a "lower budget bar" under which demands are insane for the money being offered, and we should all avoid this work unless we actively want to take a race to the bottom. But - I think there is undoubtedly a "higher budget bar" over which the stress level and expectation is made exceedingly high. This (I would imagine; I don't know, I've worked in non profits my whole life) is probably also equated with sector - if you're in a FinTech environment I would imagine you're looking at high budgets but also an insane number of highly pressured assholes shouting at you all the time. What am I basically saying? I guess - yes, charge enough (and this is probably more than you think it should be) - but also, look at the bigger picture of your work / sector. Think about happiness, work-life balance, client motivations, etc - and use this to inform what you charge and how you charge for it. That'd be my advice.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >I charge £500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the rates on here 500GBP/day is still very good by European dev wage standards. You can't compare to American wages/rates.
    • zer0tonin 4y ago
      It is pretty average for a contractor in Europe. Contractors/Freelancers have always been paid above normal wages, because the contracts offer more flexibility to the employers.
• gwbrooks 4y ago
  I do fixed project fees against tight scopes rather than hourly rates. When things go out of scope, it's expensive enough ($250-300/hr) to create a pain point. One thing I don't more of and it surprises me: There's no reason to charge all clients the same rate. If you're solving a five-figure problem for one client and a seven-figure problem for another using basically the same solution, why charge them the same?
  • philsnow 4y ago
    > If you're solving a five-figure problem for one client and a seven-figure problem for another using basically the same solution, why charge them the same? Do you have a script for sussing out the value of solving a problem for any given client? I guess savvy clients might pretend that it's not all that important/valuable to them, to prevent contractors from bidding it up.
• Exuma 4y ago
  300/hr
• abofh 4y ago
  It varies widely based on how much I think I gain from your project (experience, learning, networking etc). I'm an AWS specialist DevOps ish person, and bill around 1k/day on retainer and a bit more for "live" work. In general, if your aws bill is smaller than my invoice, we do something short term and results focused and I bill at a higher rate, if your aws bill is higher, you get a lower rate, but keep me around on call because when someone really fucks up, it balances in the wash when you're back online in hours instead of days.
• xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  Most recently my floor was USD$300/hour but billed in weeks, and sometimes I didn't do full weeks (like four day weeks during good weather). Usually minimum engagement of four weeks, 25-50% upfront (longer engagements get the lower end). I increase the rate with respect to beurocracy and scope. If I'm working with a small, single digits shop then the lower rate usually holds. If it's a larger shop and I'm going to be in a ton of meetings all the time, I usually start doubling the rate. For a F500-type company I'd never drop below $500/hour, and minimum engagement would probably grow to eight weeks. I'm a generalist. I've actually signed a number of contracts on "I will fix ~all your hard to fix bugs".
  • pyuser583 4y ago
    How much does that come out at per year? Do taxes eat up a large amount? Are you continuously employed or are there dry spells?
    • xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      I'm at a full time gig right now for various reasons but it depends on how many clients I want to have at once. I tried to limit to a handful per year, and the last year in which I did contracting I was working less than half of the year -- but by choice. Dry spells are planned, as otherwise it's difficult to line work up as often times scope changes during an engagement.
  • galfarragem 4y ago
    ..What's your main stack?
    • xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      If I'm developing services, I just write Go. I have a lot of Linux experience as well. I'm comfortable reading and patching pretty much any language.
  • cutler 4y ago
    Could you give some examples of these hard-to-fix bugs?
• 01100011 4y ago
  You need to define your question better. What is a generalist? I would have considered myself a generalist but thats with a focus on embedded/systems programming and an ability to make a shitty website/database backend. Other folks may consider themselves generalists because they handle front & backend web design or because they write applications from start to finish. What sort of information are you looking for?
• cutler 4y ago
  Which back-end programming languages do you find are most commonly required by clients who pay good rates? I'm particularly interested in the relative popularity of statically typed frameworks such as Spring Boot and ASP.Net vs Rails, Django and Laravel where serious money is at stake.
• nathias 4y ago
  25-35$ per hour, im in EU so this is the maximum I can get away with
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  1700 dollars per day, minimum 5 days
• ewuhic 4y ago
  Does everyone of you charging quite a significant sum have a LinkedIn?
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    I don't, why? Found the current job off craigslist. :-D
• adenozine 4y ago
  I bill anywhere from 85/hr to 350/hr depending on what’s going to be done, who and what I’ll need, location/commute, etc. In the DC area. I imagine a not quite bell curve with the center around ~150/hr for “accomplish X task and leave” contracts that I’m willing to entertain. Sometimes you bump into some juicy ones, sometimes not. That’s life. I’ve always told clients that above all else, they’re paying for my ability to provide them certainty, quality, and a hard deadline. I charge what I charge because I’m worth it. Depending on your reputation, if applicable, it can however be smart to work below your worth for a contract if it means a greater chance at better contracts later. You gotta build your network somehow.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  100€ per hour. I'm a contractor on paper and work with my own company (so I can pay 15% in taxes) but it's a long term job, full-time and I don't take holidays. I live in a nice low cost of living European country, even if everything is slowly degrading and I give it 10-15 years before I'll need to move. Found the job (like all my jobs) via word of mouth / personal network. Recruiters offer you significantly less per hour in my experience. I tried working with the States but I couldn't charge more (they try to pay european prices) and the work was way more stressful. Living in the States is definitely not for me though, way too many homeless and mentally ill people, not to mention the culture gets "progress"ively worse and worse. If I were employed by a FANG (even ignoring the waste of time of preparing for the interview) I would have to pay way more taxes because I would be an employee. Also they pay way less in Europe. I guess over time I could make more money, once I progress inside a FANG but that sounds hard, shaky and absolutely not fun. I need money to build a house so my current plan is to keep contracting and run side businesses to make passive income (currently at around 1/2k per month passive) until I don't need money anymore.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dhx 4y ago
  In Australia, the most common scenario is a "contractor" being a borrowed casual employee from a labour hire company and the worker gets paid per hour worked whilst being able to work 40 hours per week until the end of a project (typical durations being between 1 to 3 years). This is generally a better arrangement than being a permanent employee because: 1. Your leave (that most people can never use as they aren't sick enough or aren't going to wait around 7 years for long service leave) is paid as you go and thus you accumulate the leave between contracts. 2. You don't have to waste as much time on company/organisation bureaucratic processes such as training you didn't want to do, having to write out performance agreements, attending all staff meetings talking about the 2% pay rise you might get each year, etc and instead you can focus on getting your job done and building out your CV faster. 3. Generally contractors are kept on longer than permanent staff if a project or organisation is on the slide as contractors can be cut off abruptly and without reason when things get really bad, whereas an organisation needs to spend much more effort reducing permanent staff numbers and therefore have to start the process earlier for reducing permanent staff. Permanent staff get 4 weeks minimum notice of being made redundant whereas contractors on paper get 1 hour/1 day notice. In reality, contractors get more notice because they'll see permanent staff redundancies on the way and know to start looking for other work and if it doesn't arrive quickly, the organisation will have got rid of permanent staff quite often before they let their last contractors go. 4. It's easier to get labour hire work because there is less risk to both parties in just having a single meeting and then agreeing to a start date of tomorrow. If it doesn't work out for either party, the agreement can just as readily and easily be cancelled soon thereafter and not much is lost by either party. Permanent staff have to jump through multiple rounds of interviews, waste the valuable time of those in their work network to complete references, etc. 5. It forces workers to re-evaluate their worth at the end of each project as they're back on the market and will ask for current market rates for their next engagement. Permanent staff that stay more than 2-3 years in a role won't be re-evaluated at current market rates and will fall behind significantly in salary. Labour hire rates are readily discoverable on AusTender (Australian government website for publishing awarded contracts). For example, a SAP consultant at [1] was recently hired for what is likely a 1 year "full time" (1762hrs) term and charged to the Australian government at AUD$363,000 (including GST). From this published figure you can then deduct 10% GST, 6.85% payroll tax (ACT), insurance costs, payroll costs, etc to arrive at approximately AUD$300,000 equating to an hourly rate of AUD$170/hr (at 1762hrs worked in the year which is 40hrs/week x 44 worked weeks of the year). For low overhead labour hire firms, a casual employee may take home AUD$160/hr from this arrangement which is roughly equivalent to a AUD$280,000 salary assuming long service leave, 4 weeks notice and redundancy payouts are negligible if a permanent worker was changing jobs at the usual rate of every 2-3 years. A permanent employee would be lucky to get a salary package of AUD$220,000 from this arrangement in part because the company has to cost in the chance of the employee staying long enough to be eligible for long service leave, redundancy payouts, etc. General labour hire rates for Australian government work (and this generally transfers across sectors to private sector rates in ICT fields that are competing for similar talent) range from casual employee take-home rates of AUD$120/hr (business analysts etc) to AUD$190/hr (architects etc). The second type of "contractor" is where a services business is established that has numerous clients and/or may hire employees or engage subcontractors, accepts risk for work completed, carries a variety of insurances, manages more complex finances, performs a significant degree of business development to find more clients, etc. They are generally engaged for intermittent work at a week here, 2 days there, three weeks later, etc and rates can typically range from AUD$250/hr to AUD$400/hr. Typically work is not performed for less than a day at a time and there is a form of retainer agreement (often exceeded or extended). It is harder to find typical market rates for these services. Whilst you can see these arrangements pop up on platforms such as AusTender, you're never really sure how many hours of services have been included and the conditions of those services. For example, whether travel is an additional expense charged separately (typical case) or whether travel expenses are built into the rates. [1] https://www.tenders.gov.au/Cn/Show/95fbaed8-b19d-4fcb-8f89-d49370ac5845 https://www.tenders.gov.au/Cn/Show/95fbaed8-b19d-4fcb-8f89-d...
• sam0x17 4y ago
  $250/hr
• dunemaster 4y ago
  About three fiddy