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Comment by notzorbo3 | Hacker News Reader

> It is true that some of you guys can build a tool in a hackathon

I've kept some data on how much time I've spent on a somewhat popular open source project (+/-1000 stars on github, if that means anything).

Time to implement to scratch my own itch: +/- 24 hours

Time to write documentation, package, etc: +/- 70 hours

Time to handle bug and feature requests, support: +560 hours

So that's an overhead of around 2500%. If I was paid to do that, it would have cost around €130,000.- (and would have netted me around €5, because dutch taxes ;-) )

The emails and other forms of thank-you's from users make it more than worth it. Plus, I get to give back to the community.

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I'd also say that if you are not paid you approach the work differently. Like you can take your time with certain things maybe. A lot less stress, I'd imagine. (Depends on the project obviously. If you get yelled at by Linus, you probably should be more careful!)

True, but expectations are sometimes also higher. Documentation etc has to be of good quality. Packaging. Stuff like that. There's really no comparing it with a paid job IMHO. It's more fun i'd say.

What do you do that you charge 200 eur/hr?

Thats the fee for my part-time freelance consulting. 200 is on the low end.

Man that's expensive. Here in France, contractors tend to cost less than 400€ a day. That's almost 4 times cheaper than you are.

I guess that's the difference between consulting and contracting.

Huh, I'm way undercharging.

The higher you charge, the more horrible your consultancy job will be generally ;-) I've found €200 to be the sweet spot between actually doing useful tech work and being in nonsense meetings all day.

What sort of tech work do you do, though? Nobody is going to pay 200 EUR for frontend development, say.

All kinds really. From transitioning companies to modern CI/CD practices to security counseling to integration work to helping out with automation and such. It's about 50% low level tech stuff and %50 advisements.

Ah, I see, thank you.

You're welcome!

I think I should stress the point that people will pay more for stupid things such as lessons than they will for actually useful things. For example, you can charge twice as much for teaching people how to use Git than you can for actually implementing the frontend and backend for them.

People are really, really insecure about their own abilities. If you can position yourself in the market as someone who can help them with their insecurities, you're basically golden. It sounds a little .. dickish, but really ,you're doing everyone a favor. So many people get hung up in merely(?) having to make a decision. Making it for them it usually a big help.

That's very helpful (if a bit counter-intuitive), thank you! Isn't it kind of contradictory that, on one hand, you teach people to make decisions for themselves, and on the other you make them for them?

Common mistake -- you might want to look into Patrick McKenzie's material about consulting. Some clients you'll even be able to say "I'm raising rates" and just start getting more money for the same work without issue.

I doubt it's going to be that easy, because some clients already balk at the current rates. It greatly depends on your niche, that's why I asked the GP what he was consulting on.

Clients always balk at rates. Fire the worst ones and keep the ones who pay up if you can. You should always be looking for better clients (i.e., doing outbound sales) if you want to charge more.

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