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Ask HN: How much?
I am using an anonymous account for this post. Indeed, I registered this account solely for the purpose of this post. Sorry, pg.
I have been freelancing for almost a decade, and I still never know what to say when a prospective client asks me this question.
Given that I have always worked alone, and given that I have never talked to anyone about this topic openly, my response has always been based on personal intuition. Now I wonder if I am underselling myself.
I am not sure if this is a taboo topic among hackers, but my impression is that such a thing does not really exist. But given that I don't know any hackers who freelance personally, I have a real need for getting some more datapoints. If I don't know what others are billing, and I therefore bill significantly less out of my own ignorance and misestimation of effort, I reduce the average price at which others are able to charge. The compound effect of this is tha we are all running like hamsters on wheels for very little money.
Between 16 and 21, I made 5 to 10 HTML-only websites for between $2,000 and $5,000. I also made 3 to 5 flash-based intros/websites for between $5,000 and $20,000.
At 21, I made a .NET-based windows desktop app for $50,000.
At 24, I wrote a RoR web-based app for $100,000.
These were all freelance projects built by me from scratch while doing HS and Uni.
Does anyone else feel like sharing what they billed for contract projects (not subcontracting gigs, client-direct only -- before any type of broker takes their cut)? It doesn't have to be something you did personally. Maybe you know what the company you worked for billed for developing a specific type of app. The results will only be interesting if we get numerous data points, and the best way to motivate more responses is to respond yourself.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- noodle 17y agoassuming that your .net and RoR app took less than a year to finish and you're not killing yourself with the hours (around 40/wk), it sounds like you're doing fine.
- tptacek 17y ago150,000/yr (~75/hr) is low.
- noodle 17y agolow/high is very subjective. depends on a lot of stuff.
- tptacek 17y agoMost freelancers who can solo a multi-month .NET or RoR application make more than 75/hr.
- hackeronymous 17y agohow much per hour would you say that it's worth?
- hackeronymous 17y agowhy the downvote? It was an honest question.
- hackeronymous 17y agoAm I missing something? Is what I said offensive in some way to someone? If so, would you please care to clarify?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 17y agoYou got downmodded for complaining about being downmodded. The anchor price for generic (solo, incl. project management and interaction design, but excluding graphic design) web dev is ~$120/hr, but Rails and Django people are hard to find right now. iPhone rates seem to top out at around $200/hr, and iPhone devs "feel" like the hardest consultants to hire right now, so there's your range. Note that these rates bear no resemblence at all to what a big firm would get. There are all sorts of other risks big firms mitigate that you can't. [%] [%] (to wit: the risk of negotiating with your brain fully engaged)
- req2 17y agoA freelancer's wage is different from a salaryman's wage - health insurance dollars and the "self-employment tax" are two sizable bites to take into consideration.
- tptacek 17y agoBoth of those "bites" are true, but what the market is compensating you for is risk, not overhead.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- req2 17y agoI agree, but I simply meant that the numbers for "doing fine" differ between salary and freelance, just as the numbers for "doing fine" differ between Topeka and New York.
- hackeronymous 17y agoPrecisely. As well as the increased risk of having no contracts for long-stretches of time, and the additional overhead time of promotion, customer relations, etc.
- ujjwalg 17y agoI think it will be easier to answer your questions if rather than providing the total amount, you provide $/hour in those time periods.
- hackeronymous 17y agoThe problem with billing by the hour is that developer performance varies by a factor of 10x or more, whereas hourly fees vary by about 5x. And most clients would not feel comfortable playing $250-$300/hour unless there was some way for them to justify it. (i.e. more people involved, despite the fact that they may do nothing). Besides, why charge per hour? If I solve your problem, what does it matter how long it took me to do it?
- ujjwalg 17y agoI was not saying that you should charger per hour. I was asking that the numbers you floated will make more sense if you can provide how much time you spent on each of those projects. For example: you mentioned $100k on RoR project. This number will make more sense if you mention whether it took you 1000 hours or 10000 hours or maybe 3 months or 3 years.
- hackeronymous 17y agoOh, I see what you mean. It probably took about 1000 hours total, but spanned over a period of a year. So maybe 20 hours per week. I was just learning Rails at the time, so it took a bit longer than it otherwise would have. I could probably make what I made in about 1 to 2 months tops now.
- Tichy 17y ago100000$ for two months work seems like a good price.
- jroes 17y agohmm. even for a year's worth of work it seems like a good price. 100k/year gross working only 20 hours a week is pretty badass if you ask me. The average (full-time) web developer salary according to salary.com is 70k/year.
- nailer 17y agoI billed at AUD 75/hour as a Windows admin when 17. Now GBP 550/day at 28 as a Linux architect and infrastructure software developer.
- highplains 17y agosweet fancy moses!
- Laurentvw 17y agoJust for the sake of giving us more information, would you be willing to compare your RoR app with a website I made a while ago. I got paid $500 to make http://www.solafcars.com http://www.solafcars.com (works in multiple languages, includes an admin panel, everything on the site is editable). I would assume your RoR app was much bigger, but let us know how it compares. I know I got underpaid though.
- tptacek 17y agoDid this take more than 3 hours to make? Did you provide any post-implementation support at all? If either are true, you wildly underbid.
- Laurentvw 17y agoIt definitely took more than 3 hours, I'm not superman lol. Everything was made from scratch. The admin panel took most of my time. Keep in mind I also made the design, registered the domain name and set up the hosting. Support was also provided, we got together so I could explain how he could manage the website on his own. It was my first real freelance project though, so I let him choose the price.
- tptacek 17y agoYour pricing may be off by as many as two orders of magnitude.
- utku_karatas2 17y agoLol, dude, so you're where the Chinese companies outsource to :). Joke aside, I suggest using Django in such low budget projects if the admin is a selling point. Will save you some time at least (In Django a very slick admin is automatically there for you). Best of the luck.
- hackeronymous 17y agoIt seems to me that you got seriously shafted on that deal. I don't think that the app I made was much more complex, i.e. I probably maybe spent 10x as much time as you did on that one, but I made 200x more money doing it. The pricing of these things seems to be very subjective to me, and contingent on numerous factors including: How much they've actually got to pay for it? How much they think they can get away with? How much they think someone else would bill them for it? How much their friends tell them it should cost? What is the actual application? How much incremental money do they stand to make as a result of its existence? And very little with how much time/effort actually goes into it on your part. Ofhand, you could have easily made at least $5k on that site. And if it was for a more general purpose, i.e. as opposed to just one dealership, you could have made much more.
- pmjordan 17y agoI've been trying to work this out for some months now, so apologies for piggy-backing onto this question: How do you actually achieve market prices? I'm aware that there are massive differences in how much you can charge based on location, but I still feel I'm hitting more resistance to my asking prices than I should be. As far as I can tell, it's not a quality issue. I've had repeat business from almost all my past customers and none of the others were unhappy as far as I can tell, and I've had zero downtime for over 6 months now after starting 15 months ago. Yet, if I give a straight hourly figure, 90% of the time I'm either told it's too much or I never hear back at all. I do a little better when quoting a fixed price based on the same hourly rate (plus buffers, etc), but many times the work is too ill-defined to come up with a definite offer, so it comes down to giving an hourly rate, with the usual result. I've had the most success and repeat business with extremely time-sensitive projects, or projects that have gone off the rails and need turning around. I charge about 50% more if I'm basically being asked to work day and night. Once the work is done and done well (and it always is), I can generally get future projects at the standard rate with no major trouble. I've reluctantly tried the loss-leader strategy of charging less on the first project, and as expected it's not terribly effective. So as far as I can tell, the issue isn't so much the price as proving I'm worth it. How do you guys handle referrals, references, etc.? A lot of my work involves NDAs (as it's often subcontracted), which makes referring to existing work and customers extremely difficult. I have a few customers who are brilliant and who I can use as references, but as far as I know, nobody has ever followed them up. Other than literally becoming known by everyone in the area, what other options do I have? Am I expecting a higher conversion rate than I should be? How do I go about finding more well-paying customers? Maybe I'm tending to the wrong niches, too. My background is mainly in high performance computing, game tech and web apps. - I've had zero HPC freelance work, and no leads either. No clue where to find them. - I've had a sizeable amount of game tech programming, but getting reasonable money from game devs seems to be like squeezing blood from a stone. - The web app business can yield better results, but there's a sea of awful programmers (who seem to exclusively know PHP for whatever reason) out there who call themselves web developers. Their hourly rates are dirt cheap, but their efficiency is lower still. I still can't reliably get this through to potential customers. - The easiest money is in business-y/enterprise-y development. Except the only way I seem to be able to do this is via subcontracting, which is suboptimal because it's the middle man getting the reputation. I'm not sure what other areas are more lucrative. Embedded stuff seems like a good fit to my skill set (game console development isn't far off) but I have no clue how to even find potential customers. I'm not sure how or where best to sell myself to enterprise-y businesses.
- larrykubin 17y agoOver the past few years, I've worked on quite a few PHP/MySQL/jQuery/Oracle webapps for clients. I've never worked on a plain HTML site or a Flash site, so I can't provide any stats there. Here are some of my stats - most projects I have worked on cost around 10-20k, average around 75-100 an hour, and take approximately 3 months of part time effort. I've done maybe 15 to 20 projects of this length/cost. I like projects of about this size because: I am not overwhelmed, it allows for nice quarterly vacations ~ a week each, the requirements aren't overly complicated, I have free time during the day, and the projects don't drag on forever. I freelance in Austin, my wife covers me on her insurance, I'm in my late 20's, and have done this for 3 years. I have bid on a few 100k-size, year long projects, but have not been selected for any of them so far. So it goes.
- hippee-lee 17y agoIf you don't mind me asking, where/how do you find projects to bid on?
- ujjwalg 17y agoSomehow I feel that this post was more about being boastful than anything else.
- hackeronymous 17y agoActually, no. But I can see why you would think that. I literally don't know the range of what is reasonable and what is not. Your comment is implicitly informative, though. Furthermore, if I was being boastful, I would probably not be hiding behind an anonymous account.
- caffeine 17y agoCould you add estimates of the amount of time each site took you (in hours), not including time spent teaching yourself, but including all time spent writing code, corresponding with clients, etc.? That would make it easier to compare.
- natrius 17y agoBoasting usually isn't done to make other people feel bad; it's to make the boaster feel good. This post could serve that purpose even anonymously. If people confirm that you indeed are being highly compensated, that could make you feel good about yourself. Not that I think that was the intention.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- weirdwes 17y agoThis has often been a hesitation of mine when being asked to do freelance projects. Before I took a web programming job, I had no formal training or experience so I always felt like I couldn't ask for high hourly rates because I wasn't confident enough in my work. After landing a job and doing it for a living, I still felt like I couldn't charge much because I would compare it to my salary which was a FAR cry from anything close to $50+ an hour. Because of the inhibitions, I've always just stuck with friends, friends of friends and family members when doing projects. Now that I'm unemployed, I really think I need to reevaluate what my work is worth and start asking for a decent rate when projects come my way. The comments in this thread are definitely telling me I'm selling myself short - both in freelance projects and in what I fought through to earn what I earned at my last job. Enjoying this thread. :)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- z8000 17y agoBoy am I in the wrong business if these kids can knock out CRUD apps for $100K.
- christofd 17y agoWell, Laurent charged only $ 500 USD for his solution (but that's an anomaly). If you are serious about web apps, then scaling the back end comes into play, which means getting into distributed systems. Networking, security and SysAdmin become relevant as well. I think it's fair to charge up to $100K with a college education and/or work experience in the field. Other professions do so as well. Go pick on other professions: i.e. banker bonuses, real estate commissions, union rates, lawyer rates etc.
- ujjwalg 17y agoso you are saying $500/hour is industry average? Hackeronymous mentioned that he charged $100k for a 1000 hour work which he could have done in almost 1/6th time if he was experienced. I am not sure about the industry average, but I work through guru/elance/odesk and average seems to be $50-$150 for an experienced developer.
- christofd 17y agoNo, in the example on this thread Laurent, a Belgian programmer, charged $ 500 USD for the whole solution, the whole shebang. (He could have just given it away for free, since the main point was to establish a reference) Although, I admit... this example is really just a CRUD app, with no advanced server back end.
- utsmokingaces 17y agodamn I need to charge my clients more.
- tptacek 17y agoHere's a useful outside perspective: http://www.cartalk.com/content/columns/Archive/1999/October/01.html http://www.cartalk.com/content/columns/Archive/1999/October/...
- SwellJoe 17y agoNot sure why you consider this such a touchy subject that you had to do it anonymously. Charging money for your services and skills is not a bad thing. I've rarely done software development contracting, but I spent several years as an IT contractor (with a lot of scripting, and simple web-based UI work to make it possible for non-technical people to carry on when I've gone). I started at $95/hour, and by the end was quoting $150/hour with a four hour minimum for off-site work, and eight hour minimum plus expenses for on-site work (with a $1000/day discount rate for multiple days). Most of my development work over the years has been product-focused, wherein no one client paid for the whole thing. I would build as generally as possible, retain ownership, and sell the result to many customers. I wasn't very good at this for the first five years or so, however, and ended up doing a lot of development for pennies on the dollar. I would talk to a potential customer, they'd say, "We wish your products could do X and Y." and I'd think, "Yeah, I bet a lot of people would like that", and would offer to provide it for some ridiculously low price ($199, or whatever) as a plugin for my existing product line...spend two or three weeks working on it (and sometimes money for icons, design, other developers, etc.) and then never sell another copy of that plugin. I suggest not doing that.
- antidaily 17y agoI used to throw out numbers and almost always underbid. These days I ask for the budget, figure out how many hours that comes out to, and tell them what they get. I never give a number before the potential client tells me what they can spend. They know what they can afford so why play games?
- herrherr 17y agoUnfortunately some clients like to play this game and don't mention their budget. In my opinion this makes it worse for both sides.
- herrherr 17y agoIn my 3 years of freelancing I have done quite a few websites (40+), but I never reached prices that were this high. Here are my rates. Btw I see no reason to post this anonymously. It's ok to charge money =) - HTML Website $1500+ (without design) - CMS $2200 - $12000 (without design) Normally I'm using fixed prices, but in case someone specifically asks for my hourly rate I quote $70/h. Note: I ran this business part-time while doing my bachelor. Since I'm now a B.Sc (since last week) I think I might increase the rates. Guess that's appropriate, right?
- Andys 17y agoSpeaking for myself, if I was hiring someone to do a website, or a CMS, I couldn't care less if they had a B.Sc. or not. I wouldn't check, and I certainly wouldn't let it change my mind about the price being charged.
- herrherr 17y agoI'm fine with your argument, but you would be suprised how some clients are argueing. For example: "You are no professionals (read: no finished studies), therefore I'm not paying more than $X."
- Andys 17y agoSo they're just using it as a technique to get a discount? That's terrible :-(
- midnightmonster 17y agoClients are sometimes amused that I actually majored in English and philosophy, but I've never gotten any grief about it. Raise your rates because after 40 sites you're better than you were 3 years ago.
- utku_karatas2 17y agoAs another freelancer much below your rate I wonder if they knew you were a one man show in your 100K project. Usually firms want to see teams and sales reps in suits if they're going to shell out large amounts like that. How did you ever gained their trust?