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Comment by quakenul | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why when paying weekly people would not turn the discussion on slashing the rate in contrast to paying hourly? I don't see the disconnect between the two and why it shouldn't be possible to also go "My rate is 100$, we need 40 hours, you can only pay 30, okay, what do we slash?"

In fact, that is what I am doing right now.

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When you charge $100, and the client wants to negotiate, psychologically, $10 seems like a little change, but is actually 10% of your revenue.

If you charge $10,000 / week, and the client wants to negotiate, they'd have to argue to remove $1000 / week for an equivalent change in revenue, which is much different psychologically.

Some of it is perception.

At one of the spectrum is junior offshore testers billing by the hour. On the other is McKinsey, who bills by the study. The former gets more rate pressure than the latter. Charging weekly or monthly appears more professional than hourly. (Lawyers are the exception)

People will compare hourly rates to people's salaries in a way that don't really compare weekly rates.

$200/hr seems rediculously expensive to pay a dev. but a $8k/week will intuitively be compared to the value they get from the project, and 16k to increase wbesite traffic 30% seems like a steal.

What if it's not website traffic or ecom sales you are increasing? What if the payoff is 6 months down the road?

Up to you to sell the benefits of the projects. 6 months is medium, it's not difficult to project that far.

What do you do?

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