However the thing to remember is that most businesses aren't throwing the kind of cash that they can pay a programmer $250/hr. I disagree with this. In fact,

However the thing to remember is that most businesses aren't throwing the kind of cash that they can pay a programmer $250/hr. I disagree with this. In fact, one of my largest side job customers is a trash company and I can give you an example of one of the projects I worked on. For every job he does, there is a variable charge both from his supplier (another trash company) and his customer. Original state was that he had a bookkeeper that he paid $70,000 per year that calculated, recorded, charged and followed-up on the revenue and expense of this variable charge for every job. I came in and modified his dispatching system to do all this work in a fully automated way. This did two things: 1) Eliminated a $70,000 per year (salary) bookkeeper that all in was probably costing $100,000 per year with benefits, 401k, medicare taxes, social security taxes, etc. 2) Increased net revenue for these variable charges by $100,000 per year. With the bookkeeper formerly doing this all manually, she was only catching a small percentage of the revenue but paying all the expenses. (Because guess who was the squeaky wheel in this transaction?) What is a $200,000 per year bottom line improvement worth to the average small business? There are many ways to evaluate this. Small businesses often look at payback period. A good payback period for a project is typically considered one year or two years. If that is the case, then the project is worth $200,000 to $400,000 to the customer. Now consider that the whole project actually took me 45 hours that I billed him at $200 per hour for a total cost of $9,000. His payback period is now SIXTEEEN DAYS. More sophisticated small businesses as well as almost all larger U.S. businesses will consider the time value of money and actually calculate an NPV and IRR for the project. In any way that you measure the profitability of this project or similar ones, the reality is you could charge $1,000 per hour and still make it a "no brainer" for the client. There are plenty of unique need transaction-based companies that are in the same boat. And honestly that's why I'm moving to value based pricing. Hourly based pricing is asinine. I should get paid based on the value I bring to a company, not the amount of time I spend sitting in a chair typing.