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Comment by yish | Hacker News Reader

The going rate for a great developer/designer with lots of mobile experience here in SF is in the ~150 an hour range. I've seen this price go up significantly in the last couple months, primarily due to high demand at the moment. You can probably get a little cheaper outside the area and definitely less offshore, but even then a good offshore house will run you $60 and they often don't like doing fixed bids at those prices.

My experience is that app development for a medium to high complexity app with location features and accessing a 3rd party API for data would typically take 4-6 weeks including QA but really depends on the complexity.

I've done about 30+ mobile apps now so ping me if you need any advice

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Everyone reading this, please don't think the ~150 an hour range is normal for an individual developer. This is generally the rate for a full service design/development agency where you get an account manager, secretaries, etc.

I do iPhone development and haven't met anyone getting even close to $150/hr individually. If someone made that, they'd be be making $6,000/week and $300,000/year.

yish, can you confirm that this is an agency rate, not an individual developer/designer rate? or is this the rate you're making personally?

I have seen 150/hr corp to corp or 1099 for single-person developers.

Time spent getting contracts, doing administration, etc. means you can't bill for 100% of your time, but you can definitely make 200-300k/yr pre-tax pre-expense if you work like a dog. Taxes in CA will cut that down to 100-150k net, so it is more like a 100-200k/yr job.

$150/hr does not seem out of the ordinary for this particular discipline (iphone development).

The rate in SF is between 100 and 150 depending on experience.

I know UI designers (who work on iPhone & iPad apps) that make $120-150 per hour for their work and they work for themselves, no agency. Of course your goal is to have 40 hours a week of billable work but it never really works out like that :)

40 hours a week of billable work is damn near impossible. Even if I could find that much work, I wouldn't be able to handle it on a regular basis.

Actually, this is the rate for a good small team, agencies can go even higher (I've seen $180 quoted and have heard of, but never personally seen, higher).

I also think part of the challenge is that to have a stand out app, you now need a team with UI/VisD/Dev skills. Expectations of consumers have grown since the early app store days, and a lone developer rarely cuts it anymore unless they also have some real design chomps.

I charge $150/hr and I am a single developer in Austin so it is just not the high-rate of living areas.

Sincere contrats to those of you who are consistently getting this rate.

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