Ask HN: How many freelance programmers are there?
Writing software that could help freelance programmers who bill hourly. Wondering if there are enough of us out there to justify my effort on the tool. Curious about the US and worldwide.
What makes your solution better than Quickbooks or GnuCash?
What percentage of the market for free-lancer programmers can a bespoke product capture?
Why go through all the development effort of a book-keeping program and then only target it at a very limited market?
Good luck.
One possibility is you could use my tool to create a timesheet and then import that into Quickbooks. But the tool will also create a PDF invoice for you.
The tool has addressed a pain point for myself personally, but you're right - it may be too niche to be worth putting out there. My market is 'programmers who bill hourly and use git'. Maybe not that many people, and lots of those people might be happy with how they track time already.
I have my own rails app that handles time tracking, and invoices. (Some customers just log into the app, and pay their bills without my involvement.) I spend about two hours a month on invoices.
Also I'm curious - how do you collect payment? I usually only have one client at a time paying large sums so I ask for a check in the mail. All the online forms of collecting payment seem to take too much of a percentage.
Perhaps a really cool way of doing this sizing would to use "authorship attribution" techniques over webpage javascript to see how many "authors" there were -- tho that could likely be way off as well. Seems like a ridiculously involved way of calculating it tho.
Part of the reason I asked is that I work freelance, but all the other programmers that I know are full-time employees. So in my small world it seems like there are not that many of us.
I've found that it's pretty easy to get clients to agree to this if they know & trust you (I always work with people that I know from my full-time career.)
This article has some stats - http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-free...
One thing I see in a lot of these articles is general reference to the term 'freelancer'. This seems to lump programmers in with writers, designers, accountants, and anyone else who can work on a contract basis.
I wonder how many of the 1 million freelancer jobs posted on elance in 2012 were programmer jobs specifically?
It creates a timesheet based on your git history, and then creates an invoice from that. It guesses the number of hours you've worked an any given day, and also shows you your work for that day and allows you to correct the estimate.
It used to take me an hour to create an invoice - now it takes about a minute.
It's not a huge savings - but for those like me who dread creating invoices it makes me happy to get it done quicker.
Of course the tool is worthless unless you are a programmer checking all of your work into git. I'm trying to find out if this thing could be useful to people other than me.
I don't freelance, but I do bill hourly for consultancy work. I just calculate the number of hours in my calendar I've assigned, and work from that. It takes minutes per month (and I know what I'm doing based on the calendar).
In some cases lawyers bill by the minute. I'm not sure they use a specialized tool, and imagine it's more like an Excel sheet with time of call.
Sounds like an interesting technology, but limited not just to freelancers who use Git, but freelancers who use Git and have a similar workflow you use (and those that have a different workflow could raise hell regarding it not working for them, especially as it's about how much they request to get paid).
I also doubt many billed clients would like to hear their billable time was guessed or estimated.