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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The HN consensus has simplified things in such a way that any shades of gray are tossed out.

When you are just starting out charging by the hour and starting with small stuff is fine. But your goal should be to transition to charging by the week as soon as you can afford it, because you can't afford to charge by the hour for your whole career.

Keep in mind that those that have 'arrived' tend to take their life experience and then condense it down to bullet points without nuance, after all, unqualified statements sound so much better than qualified ones. But it's all about the balance and to get to charging by the week you may need to start by charging by the hour.

Service > product > weekly rates > daily rates > hourly rates.

The further you are to the left the more money you'll make but you have to start somewhere.

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I agree with all of this, but I'd warn that unless you really know what you're doing and what can go wrong, jumping from weekly billing to project billing can be super dangerous and you're taking on a lot of risk. Most people aren't great at locking in scope for projects, let alone estimating the work it will take once the scope is locked; once you agree to per-project billing, you've committed and are on the hook for errors on both fronts.

To add: you can even charge by the hour in blocks of 4 if you feel more like it.

It will be the same as charging per half day, but it can help you and your client to accept that charging daily will be the next step.

This is what I am currently doing...plus, since everyone loves a "deal", I charge a slightly higher hourly rate then give away "one hour FREE" because we all know that FREE is the most powerful word in marketing.

Basically, I figure out what I would be happy with for 5 hours for work and then give them 4 hours plus one FREE hour for that amount.

This has the added benefit of nudging my hourly rate higher, since I always have a hard time raising my rates.

So true. Hourly billing is BY FAR the best way to get going. I’ve swapped to weekly contracts for a few contracts but only after an extended working relationship. Most folks won’t spring for that sort of payment, especially long term. Everyone understands and gets hourly billing.

Having any rate helps to do algebra too. Clients can suppose that $x/hour ~= $8x/day ~= $40x/week ~= $1760x/year. So even if you quote an hourly rate the discussion can still be "how much should we budget for a team of ten people next year."

Maybe the correlation between hourly billing and bad projects is not causal.

I don't understand this comment as a response to your parent one. The condensed bullet point that it linked shows that dropping hourly rates wouldn't happen until step 5. As I understand it, all you describe would fall under the period of time one takes to get through 1-4

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