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>Maybe a business needs a website offer to build them a basic website, maintenance, hosting, backups and updates for $99/mo set it up with Stripe or Paypal recurring payments.

I did this as a teenager and it ended up being a nightmare because you become a magnet for people who want thousands upon thousands of work done for no upfront cost and a low monthly fee. And it puts you in a terrible spot as you are strongly incentivized to say "Yes" to those people because you are desperate for the money and experience.

My recommendation would be to estimate and bill for the actual time put into those projects and have a fair hourly rate that reflects your knowledge and experience.

I agree. Never sign up clients on a monthly arrangement until you have a decent amount of IP available that is readily re-useable.

That way your value proposition for a monthly fee is that it effectively acts as an extended warranty, and saves the upfront costs for a client. But you need to be confident they will sign a term agreement (24+ months) and they need to be confident they can depend on you to fix things when/if they break over that long period of time.

I've seen plenty of scenarios where money has been left on the table for a client who was willing to pay upfront and the contractor did themselves out of a nice fat cheque by talking the client into a monthly arrangement (which just gives them a debtor issue).

The best projects/rates are through your network if your network is in a rich country. For someone who is in an average country, and even more so for a teenager, upwork and similar places can be very useful. Definitely were for me when I was a teen.

Regarding the rates being low on sites like this. Sure there are low rate jobs, and a bunch of people who compete by lowering rates. That doesn't mean you have to do that. It's completely possible to ask for more money on upwork & friends. The classic patio11 advice of charging more works just as fine on upwork as it does elsewhere.

If you're in a rich country, you're still very likely to get very poor rates through friends and family as a teenager, around 1-10% of market rate for a college graduate, at least that's my experience, but maybe I just sucked at marketing myself when I was a teenager.

$100 a month for website maintenance and backups?

In the UK the low end of website design has been eaten up by the DIY web-builders (eg Wix). Usually you can tell, because of the inferior (!) design the small companies that aren't using such tools - often they appear to be using "bedroom companies".

When you get up to a reasonable price then IMO you can't expect to get a good enough product from a singleton worker any more (I used to do some full-stack web design/dev). Sure the design could be great, what about the back-end security, what about the optimisation, what about the SEO, social media promotion/interop, ...

Even just a couple of years has changed this market considerably.

That said small businesses don't always know about the advances, so you can probably still get work.

For local businesses you can sell a package at $99/mo for creating the site, providing hosting, backups, maint. for a simple 4 page site. You take a little risk forgoing the initial payment for building the site but once they are on board you'll make more over the next few years. For a teenager once you have a few of these on board you won't be as hungry for taking low budget projects. But yeah lots of businesses expect a full site for $375.

The rates are low for your first jobs, but if you're good at what you do you can still charge a lot more on those sites.

Yeah, they're obviously not as good as your own network. But, if you literally don't have anything else going on they're a start.

The best projects and rates are through your network. Family friends, businesses your family uses like you mention.

Indeed. Consider taking out an ad in your school newspaper; I had good luck with that back in the day.

Start with minimum wage for your first project. You're likely going to suck, and you don't want to piss off your family friend or have an awkward money discussion.

That's for strangers for business relationships. You should up your rate every 2-3 months to begin with as you build up your portfolio.

y, increasing your rate is a good idea. Don't start with minimum wage though. For early clients I liked to try to do things at a fixed fee that I had a good handle on how long it would take. With a fixed fee they can't see your hourly rate and won't raise a red flag if they are paying you more than they make. Some clients are really sensitive when they hear things like $50 or $100 per hour.

For starting out I would target at least $20 per hour as your target hourly rate. Sounds like you have a bit of experience so you could probably go higher. Use this target hourly rate to set your fixed fee prices.

As you gain more experience and get better clients and projects increase your hourly rate. You'll get faster at things too. So you can increase your rates over time up to $50/hr and $100/hr+.

Learning Rails or Laravel to expand your skills and earning potential. Plus they make working on even small projects easier/faster. I'm a big fan of Laravel. Check out forge.laravel.com for setting up and deploying to VPS.

Also break projects down in to phases. That way you don't have a large fixed fee phase that takes up too much time.

For new/most clients get 50% up front and 50% upon completion for each phase.

Create a simple contract that outlines the scope of work for each phase. If there are changes or additions make sure to send the client an addition to the scope of work with a price increase to approve for that phase.