Ask HN: Am I right to ask for a raise?
I'm a contractor and I've been working on a project for the last few months with a client. This project is potentially worth millions to my client and could quite easily revolutionise their business.
It's also technically very challenging. For perspective it took another company 6 years of research and £3,000,000 to achieve something similar.
Initially we asked a small tech company to build a prototype for £60,000 but they failed to deliver anything of value.
However, over the last few months of obsessive research and development I have managed to single handedly create the entire solution myself and I am trying to decide whether I should be asking for more money to continue my work. I'm on £400 a day, but that is less than 3 times what they would have been paying the aforementioned tech company for the same work.
Were I to leave now they would struggle to continue development and would probably have to scrap the project. The tech here is extremely niche making it almost impossible to replace me at this point.
How should I play this? And am I being unreasonable to ask for more? I genuinely want them to succeed and don't want to be difficult, but I also feel like I'm being short-changed.