I mean, yes they got higher overhead than a single dev, but that's their own problem and not the problem of the client, so what's the difference fro a single dev here?
I charge per month, but it would be about 40€ an hour.
A friend of mine took 80€ a hour but they only took like 20-30h a month.
I charged per month, got paid below 80€/h but ended up with much more than him.
But well, here are some people on HN who charge per hour AND get more absolute... so it's probably also a bit of luck?
> Are they charging more because of overhead?
Partially. There's overhead you wouldn't get with a single developer like office space and administrative overhead. A big overlooked piece of overhead is sales overhead. It's much easier to find 40 hours of consulting work a week than 120 hours of work. If its a premium development shop, the developer salaries are probably higher as well. This all may cut into the margins, but it doesn't really explain why they charge so much.
> Why do they charge so much?
Because they have clients who are willing to pay that much. Plain and simple.
> What does the client get that they wouldn't with a single developer?
Some companies are bad at finding and retaining talent. This includes contractors. They also might not know how to manage a project. For a lot of companies, they need something done, but this simply isn't their area of expertise. Some single developers can manage their own projects, but sometimes they need more than just a single developer. The workload may be much higher than what a single person could manage, and hiring 3 individual developers can be much less efficient than hiring a team of 3 developers who already work well together. Perhaps they need a designer as well, or they're looking for a project manager who is really good at communicating business needs with them.
The number you threw out doesn't seem unreasonable though.
I'm just trying to understand what is needed to get ahead of the game :)