Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

147 pointsjrwoodruff158 comments

In my personal freelancing experience, I need a certain amount of money before I feel it's worth using my spare time to work for someone else. I'm curious as to what that level is for HNers. How much do you bring in on an average freelance job?

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Working in the chemical engineering area. Hard science + all the cool technologies you can read on HN => Fun + money. Usually a contract starts at $15k (2 weeks) and goes up to 2 months of work on average.

I always advice people to go the hard science way if they like computer science, because there is a really big big lack of people being good at both. I should write about it.

If you ever get a chance, please do, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

I've thought about going into a hard science industry but never did anything about it because 1) I'm not really qualified in the science side, my skills/experience/qualifications are in computer science and 2) I don't really know how to get started.

You could get started by watching MIT physics and mathematics opencourseware courses (including video lectures) to see if it suits you.

There are opportunities to pick it up. I have worked in bioinformatics labs and have learned tons of biology and chemistry just through osmosis. Also, they always need more people that program well.

I should write about it.

Please do.

How do you go about finding such projects in hard science? Is there a gigs board or is it through networking mainly?

that brings up a question for me. when you say $15K/2weeks, is that for a task that can be accomplished by a single person (2x40h), or do you have to break the job up amongst other people?

Just me, it is usually complex stuff where only one person or two in tandem can do the work. I would be pleased to be able to offload some of the work to other people, but it is hard to find people having the right skills — the niche effect, few skilled people.

just a suggestion. maybe you can create a training system, where people can "shadow you", and the possibly take some of the load off of you. of course i understand that the work is complex, so perhaps someone with the necessary academic background, but not fully knowledgeable of the tech side yet?

What kind of skills are you looking for?

How regular is this? Wouldn't that mean you could earn nearly $400k a year?

Woah woah woah. Don't forget take into account the overheads in consulting.

Just off the top of my head you'd need to think about winning each contract, paying taxes, holidays, health cover, professional indemnity, sick leave, misc business expendables (like office, phone, ISP), the list goes on.

Don't get me wrong. It is still good money I'm sure.

I'm pretty niche.. can I write you?

That sounds interesting. Can I email you?

absolutely. I've done a lot of work with automation of fabrication and testing instruments (fiberoptics) and the money's definitely good.

its also an amazing learning opportunity (and play. but never take close up photos of your phone. you'll become OCD about clean pretty fast)

I'd also be interested in what you have to write about it.

Off-topic: what books do you recommend on chemical engineering? What's the equivalent of The Art of Electronics for analog electronics, or HDL Chip Design for digital chip design, or Code Complete or Algorithms in C or CLRS or The Pragmatic Programmer or SICP or TAOCP for software?

There are very few "sit down and read" type books about chemical engineering. That being said, there are two books that I reference every day: the first physically, the second philosophically.

1) Perry's Handbook for Chemical Engineers (Perry)

2) Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes (Douglas)

Perry's is the end all be all for technical reference.

Conceptual Design is incredibly useful for learning how to quickly and accurately design an entire process. If anything, it'll teach you the best methods to go about "back of the hand" calculations for sanity checks.

Thank you very much!

the one thing about hard science - it's a specialty that can distinguish you from general programming, which may increase the rate. however, you don't want to get in the business of competing with graduate students, who are accustomed to doing very difficult work for very little money.

I did a lot of operations-research type programming in grad school, and I thought it would set me apart, but I've found that the jobs that want programming and OR skills don't seem to pay any better than other types of programming. This is jobs, not consulting gigs, though, and I'm only basing this on a few data points.

Yeah, please do. And if you can, please, I need to know if it's possible to do it remotely (or with a meeting or two at most).

- I mean, I'm not from a developed country. Is that still possible that I can take advantage of mastering both skills? I'm currently a Medicine student with good programming skills. -

I'm a chemical engineer myself, and often wondered if there were any others interested in programming as much as I am. I'd be interested to see what sorts of marriages you have made between the two fields. Do you have any links you could post or send me?

My Dad is an engraver, he's good at it, he was complaining to me that he had more work than he could handle. I suggested he raise his price then. He responded with the typical "I couldn't in good conscience charge that for something that takes me only a few hours to do!" And then we had a long discussion about how the market sets the rate, not you, and if you hold your rate under market it will overwhelm you because you're leaving money on the table, if you don't have enough work to keep you busy then you're over market. The key here is the market sets the rate, you don't.

Once we established that it was pretty easy to see how letting his rate float up would help with his workload, he would not only be less overloaded but he would be collecting more of the market value of his work. Since in his case (he's nominally retired) not working at all was just fine, he had a lot of freedom in over shooting the market and then coming back.

I recognize that its not as useful for someone who is wondering where rent money will come from.

This is so true and the funny thing about it is that it makes sense logically yet it runs so contrary to our natural inclinations or at least mine and I'm sure many others.

Economics you so crazy.

That's the basic thesis of Earn1K - the "I will teach you to be rich" course. I won't link here, as it's commercial, but the blog is worth a look even if you're not a paying customer.

I won't link here, as it's commercial

What's wrong with linking a commercial product or course?

This is a discussion about making money on a website with a strong slant towards making money by starting and running businesses.

http://www.google.co.uk/#q=i+will+teach+you+too+be+rich

Go on...

So, did he set his prices? What happened? What did he charge prior and how much did he change... and most importantly, is he happier?

Heh, yes he's much happier. He's much happier with the adjusted workload and it hasn't really changed his annual income all that much (perhaps a bit more income but a lot less work). Life is, to all outward extents, both more manageable and less stressful. He still undercharges his friends :-)

I think you still didn't directly answer the question. I'll assume (just a guess from your comment) he increased his rates?

He's much happier with the adjusted workload and it hasn't really changed his annual income all that much (perhaps a bit more income but a lot less work).

Do the math.

He could charge extra for fast turnaround. If someone needs a job done quick they can pay a fixed or variable surcharge. That way your dad doesn't have to feel bad about charging more for the work itself.

Yeah. It's weird to think about making a lot of money for a small amount of work, but it does make sense in the market.

I mean, if 16 people are willing to pay for an hour of your time on Monday, and you're only going to work 8 hours, how do you decide which lucky 8 people get your services? 1) First come first serve? 2) Pick 8 at random? 3) Pick the 8 who want it most?

#3 is most easily measured in "dollars they will pay," so you raise your price. Of course, it also favors the wealthy, so if you feel badly about that, do some pro bono or find a way to provide tiers of service at different prices.

This is capitalism 101.

Funny thing is, my parents (who are both near-retirement service providers in their own professions) won't adopt such a model in either direction (raising their rates or decreasing their rates based on workload).

They also just recently chastised my brother (who is in his mid-20s) for doing an arbitrage play where he could get a plentiful supply of iPad 2's on discount and sell them above market rate on eBay.

Threads like this remind me that I wasn't bought up in a capitalist family.

Most of my generally very pro-market older relatives are actually kind of squeamish about that sort of thing, oddly enough. They're probably more libertarian on government and regulation than most younger people I know, but much stronger on a "fair price for fair work" sort of ethic, where they look down on arbitrage-type plays, and on charging too high markup above cost + moderate profit. To them, running an "honest business" that charges reasonable prices, based on hard work, and doesn't engage in any trickery, is what American capitalism is supposed to be about (in a mid-20th-century white American middle-class view of capitalism).

My parents are very much left wing but have no problem with arbitrage (unless you rely on people's lack of knowledge or on their stupidity to pull it off) or charging market prices.

Don't ever regret that.

Moreover, for many services, clients have no idea who is good at providing the service, and one of the best ways you can "advertise" that you can deliver the service well is to raise your rates. Some clients will assume, perhaps with warrant, that the most expensive providers do the best work, and thus really are least expensive in terms of value to the client. Try it.

Nearly every gig has been over $50K with the most being $250k for 12 months. Most of my work has been in Silicon Valley with a couple of telecommuting stints in LA and Chicago (which lasted for a decade).

Most gigs have been with companies where software is the product or an integral part of the offering, so price was not really an issue. Almost always I bill hourly because the work involves existing system where a fix is 5 lines of code. but finding where the 5 lines go may take two days of work.

I got two significant jobs off of Craigslist, but most have come from people that I have worked with.

One lesson I learned this year as a newbie consultant: there is a heck of a lot of dynamic range in that top bucket. It's like software: even if everyone you know pays $5 or $10 or $30 for software, don't necessarily let that set your expectations, because software can get arbitrarily expensive.

Like $40 million for a simple paywall.

That doesn't work.

I found that I had been undercharging for the past few years when quoting projects. While my hourly rate had been fine (around $75 for design, $100 for programming), my estimation of how many hours a project would take was always way off. I guess the assumption I made was "no one would pay a lot of money for a website," and so I typically got tedious lower-end clients that were much more work than they were worth.

The last few projects I've gotten average to about $7k each and are about 1-2 months in duration. The highest I've gotten is $10k for a 2 month design and development gig, working very casually over that time (enough time to work on other projects freely). I'm now learning that people are willing to pay for high quality work and consistent/reliable communication.

This poll seems to be doin it rong. I couldn't put a single figure on it and say "I won't get out of bed for less than this" because so long as my hourly rate is satisfactory, I'll do 30 minutes work and bill someone for it.

I work out my hourly rate like this:

There are about 219 work days in a year after leave and entitlements. As a freelancer I'll probably stay billable 3/5 of those and on average I can hope for 6 effective billable hours per day, so there are about 788 billable hours per year.

I then think of my target yearly salary and divide by number of billable hours per year. I actually have some indirect overheads, too so I add a margin on that, but if you're straight up freelance you may not need to.

That's your base rate. So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes) you can work for 30 minutes, charge for half an hour, issue the invoice and be done with it.

If I get a longer contract, I usually reduce the hourly rate commensurately by increasing the ratio of billable to non-billable hours I'm expecting in that year as a result.

So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes)...

What systems do you recommend? Excel spreadsheet for tracking + invoice template is really inefficient for me.

I wrote an invoicing system years ago that is still limping along (although I'm looking for a complete online accounting package that has a timesheeting API because ... )

I do all my timesheeting through an IRC bot which works really well. The bot reads tasks from my task system (I just create pages in my CMS and expose them through the API) so I type things like:

askl start client: job name

where client and job can be partial matches. When I make an entry it goes into the timesheet and I can either use that to generate my invoices directly (in the case of billable hours) or use it to offset a loss against a sales invocie (in the case of a fixed price quote).

Ah very interesting way of going about it :P Specifically the IRC bot. What's the rationale behind an IRC bot to read your task system?

Maybe I should do this as a blog post ... basically we use our own product, Decal CMS for managing our tasks. It exposes all your pages and data in an XML API. We have "tree" templates and "sprint" templates. A sprint page is added as the child of a tree page. You can timesheet against a tree, if you're doing some unplanned maintenance or something that just crops up, or you timesheet against a sprint if this is actually what you're supposed to be working on (this allows us, theoretically, to tell when a sprint is late because someone has been pulled in too many other directions, but in practice we don't have tools to report on this yet).

So the IRC bot reads from the task system so that you can just type like:

askl: start decal

in order to start working on decal if you're doing some unplanned support or maintenance work, or if you're helping someone else out with their work, basically this is seen as an interruption from what you're scheduled to do.

Otherwise you can do this:

askl start: decal: some release

to timesheet against a sprint (we block off time in google calendar to allocate work). Each "sprint page" has a structured xml component on it (this is like, Decal terminology that won't make sense until you try it - we should have a live demo ready in a few weeks so you can give us your email address by going here if you want to be told when that happens: http://www.decalcms.com/page/Try_it_Out).

This structured XML component is where we put the client name, dates for the sprint and costs basis (either fixed price or amount per hour). This information is then used to make entries in the timesheeting system so we can tell whether to mark time as billable (in the case of per hour) so that it will generate an invoice, or not in the case of a fixed price where I raise an invoice separately and then the profit made on that "sale" is offset by the "loss" made in the development hours.

All of this is very ad-hoc, strung together with duct tape and pixie dust and most of it works most of the time. The most important thing is that all our hours and work are logged, and that's how we work out leave entitlements at the end of the year.

ie. each person is expected to put in 6 billable hours per day for 219 work days per year. So at the end of the year we just sum the hours you worked, and whatever is left over is how much leave you get the following year.

Right. yeah. I should really do a blog post at some point about this :)

My last 3 side-projects (while working fulltime at BigCo): $750, $750, $2700

Over time, I have become less and less interested in these kinds of side-projects as I have become more focused on owning the upside of my own products. But, its occasionally nice to get paid for my late-night coding adventures.

Do you have projects that generate cash flow? If so, how did you decide on those projects and how long did it take for you to see a meaningful amount of cash flow?

Just a trickle of cashflow, and it took ~2 years of generating enough traffic from various sources (other projects) to drive the trickle that I have now. For a ballpark, if the current growth is sustained, the trickle should be enough to buy a car in just over a year.

The concepts for the things I am building now were distilled from several other failed ventures. The choices were based on the projected market sizes.

How do you go about doing estimation? When you are asked for a bid and have loose requirements what are some good practices for estimating?

Best way I've found is to start out on hourly gigs, until you have a sense of how long certain tasks take you. With experience, you get better at estimating your time.

EDIT: Oh and when you start out, if you're estimating time, double it.

And then add half again.

that's the secret, 3x.

Also, start out on hourly gigs - and then always stay with hourly gigs (time & materials). If you fixed price work you end up having to piss off clients with anal scope management (or you take a bath).

A number between e and pi.

and then switch to next higher time unit (without changing the number)

This has worked for me. I estimate it will take 8 hours - quote 16 days.

I never thought about this before, But surely will keep it on Mind next time i'm quoting a gig.

I am so incredibly horrible at estimation that I bid more with emotion.

If I find the project very interesting and I can fall in love with building it, the client is going to get a good deal. Boring or otherwise tedious projects engender some stone-cold, take-it-or-leave-it negotiation. I mean, this is my free time.

Edit: Nevermind that extra bit, however true. :)

I wrote a blog post you might find interesting that talks specifically about quoting web design projects: http://devgrow.com/how-to-properly-quote-a-client/

That's how I go about it and have found it to be the best/only way to ensure I don't overwork myself.

A great tool that I've come across for helping out with setting your rate is at http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/. It got me thinking of many areas of expenses that I hadn't considered. It is geared more to those of us doing it full-time.

Check out (non-aff link) http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...

It's a good summary on a several techniques, how to apply them, and how to pick how in depth of a one to do, as well as how to talk with people who try to negotiate with them.

What I do for estimations, is to break tasks into small pieces, then estimate each piece, and add the total. As someone said, it is highly advisable to still double the total.

One of my customers, which I greatly admire, is very old guard and don't buy nothing of agile, extreme, scrum, etc. He only accept strict a to b estimates. Working with him, while hard, has made me much better at making estimates.

Heh, I've also got problems with estimating the end price. Mostly I think: WTF?! I can't charge that much for this simple work. I always forget that the "simple work" is black magic to most of my clients.

it amazes me how few people who do contract work create a requirement docs. Before you even give the potential client a quote, create a requirement doc of every little feature that will be included in the project. Then show it to the client to make sure nothing has been missed or out of scope. Once you have this list you can accurately estimate how long each little piece will be to do. Add in the time it takes to create a requirements doc, an additional % to account for how much time will be spent communicating with the client and anything else that might be specific to that project and you've got yourself a quote.

Another benefit of a requirements doc is if the client later says he expects some additional feature, you can refer to the requirement doc and say that it'll cost extra since it's not listed in there and your original quote didn't include it (or let them know that you're going out of scope for free because you want to help them out which will make them love you [only do this if you're ahead of schedule]).

Also back when I was doing freelance stuff I usually wouldn't even take a gig if I didn't think I would make > $5,000 from it.

The problem is often that the work is not clearly defined. Sitting down and thinking about the project, what the client asked for vs. what they really need, listing the unknowns, doing some tests to validate an approach... this can take a lot of time.

What I want to start doing with projects that aren't clearly defined, is to simply do an initial contract to nail down some of these details. Build a prototype, do some tests and write a detailed spec - and then the next contract will be building it for real. (Maybe with some inexpensive outsourcing.)

so basically what you're saying you want to do is do work for clients who have a high probability of not paying you because they don't even know what they want. This can still be accomplished but it still needs a requirements doc. Let them know that they'll be charged for an initial requirements doc, then you'll create a prototype, then a rewrite of the requirements doc. Also charge these clients a 50% retainer for this part of the project.

Prototypes aren't as useful as you would think. Clients see them and are like "hey that's a nice mock up, now make what I want", then you build the actual application and they say "well where's feature X, Y and Z?!?! when you say it wasn't in the prototype they just say "well I thought it wasn't there because it was just a mock up"

Ideally though, you want to charge them for the requirements doc (and get paid for it) before you start the actual project. You can usually tell the client this and tell them they can use the requirements doc to shop around with other developers so they can get the best deal. Clients are usually happy with this and usually don't bother shopping around.

My freelance gigs tend to be as a subcontractor building out Film marketing websites and games. It generally involves a significant amount of interactivity either in Flash or HTML5/JS/CSS3, and since I know that Film marketing budgets are usually relatively robust, I feel no qualms starting my bids at about $8000 for 3 weeks worth of part-time work (nights and weekends). Usually the projects are more like 6 weeks, so I often charge around $12-14k, and my clients rarely counter.

Additionally, this is usually 80%-90% coding. The firm that hires me is usually responsible for all the design comps and photoshop files.

I quit my job this year and have been making a reasonable living via Elance and oDesk. Mostly GWT/Google App Engine projects, but starting to dip into Android as well.

On oDesk I was lucky enough to meet a great client almost immediately. I got an ongoing project with him for ~30 hours/week. I think I'm grossly undercharging him, but it's a steady gig that leaves me able to pick up other projects on the side.

For fixed price projects I generally don't even bother considering anything under $5K. I try to stand out by bidding high rates (by Elance standards). So far it's working fairly well. I hope to develop enough happy customers so that eventually I'll be able to move off of those sites and just get clients by word of mouth.

Some people seem to get it backwards. They think they are their own client. WRONG!!

It does not matter one bit what I or others charge. What matters is WHO IS YOUR IDEAL CLIENT?

If you know that, you know what VALUE you bring to them and you can charge whatever you want to solve a real problem.

Otherwise you are trading time for money. AKA - Job.

Does Rolls Royce consult Honda as to what to charge for their products? No. Two different markets with two different clients and two very different ways of solving a clients/customer's problems.

Couldn't agree more on value vs time. It doesn't matter at all how long I slave over the hot laptop, it's the value I bring to the client! One hour of optimization that saves $5000 a year in server costs is a steal at $2000/hr over 2-3 years.

I work 100% remotely, from not a first world country, and my hourly rate has been escalating with each project. Currently at around 40$/hour. But instead of cashing in, I am rather investing time into improving more, and preparing some interesting personal projects that define myself. I love great challenges, and want to eventually get into something really interesting. Or maybe I will go by myself, and launch a startup that I has been thinking about for some time.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to know $/hour?

Sadly this can be a very skewed number as it will differ per project type, length of project and locality. I would be more interested in hearing what people charge on an hourly basis - but alas this same issue would occur there. Without a literal "How much would you charge to do X (and where do you live)?" type question it is hard to come up with a number that could be used for comparison.

You can use a different unit to remove the cost-of-living variation: "how many months of rent do you charge for an aggregate month of gigs?"

Though in heavily dense areas that have different commutable neighborhoods this can still be off. In NYC you have commuters from New Jersey, Connecticut, the various Borroughs and even upstate NY or Pennsylvania. Each of these will have a vast difference in average rents within their community - for example, my rent in Staten Island for a comparable place within any of the other Burroughs will be a lot lower because I am willing to trade in commute time for it, even though my salary will be comparable to other developers within NYC.

I was very much into freelancing until I joined my full time job since last 3 months.

I started out with $10/hour (in India) and was up to $50/hour which made me some decent money. I usually charged hourly as estimates are fragile (even after a lot of experience). It used to come to around $30000/year (considering some 600 hours of work yearly). Adjusting lifestyle, that is equivalent or more, compared to $100K in the US.

Work areas - Front End Dev., JS, iOS Apps.

Me - http://about.me/dytrivedi http://advancewith.us/stuff/Resume.pdf

PS: Clients pay for quality work/code. Don't hesitate to raise rates if you think you're worth. Can be determined by demand.

I have looked at sites like odesk or elance and those just suck for US freelancers as they do not pay shit. No one can outbid some russian company charging $3 per hour.

Where do you go to find projects?

I'm curious about this as well. I've posted my skills on craigslist and sent stuff out to my friends, but I always receive requests from people who can only pay very little. Either that, or I'm not doing a very good job of advertising myself - which is a definite possibility.

Reminds me how once a customer came to me and needed his elance-made-in-russia-iphone-app fixed because it "mysteriously" crashed since apple "broke it" with the new iOS version. (ASAP!)

I took a look at the code and ... you know what happens in japan with that nuclear plant right now? Yeah, the app was the fukushima of code. It only hold together because of luck. Luck didn't last till iOS 4 where Apple seemingly changed something about how cocoa touch retains objects internally and the app exploded. Objects were randomly released and the programmers didn't care about any conventions. They returned objects with retain counts of 1 from a static lib and then released them somewhere later in another static lib. Not a single autorelease was used.

At least there was extensive doxygen generated documentation ... in russian (no joke).

You get what you pay for. And yes you can't compete with the people offering their services on odesk/elance. And you don't want to work for cheap asses that post "need augmented reality app for max $200" jobs.

I'm sure you could have eloquently described the code without comparing it to Fukushima. It is an ongoing crisis, part of a larger natural disaster, with many people still actively grieving.

It is a ridiculous analogy anyway. Fukushima failed, yes, but only after a magnitude 9 earthquake, followed by a devastating tsunami, overwhelmed its myriad safety systems. I don't know how any right-minded person could ever form the impression it was only "held together by luck".

Definitely stay away from those sites unless you plan on doing volume/mass work to compensate for the low wages (or unless you have a big reputation). Like I mentioned in another post, at least 85% of my freelance gigs come from my existing network and their word-of-mouth referrals. I've found clients are much willing to pay more when they trust the consultant and a verbal referral from a friend can go a long way in providing that trust.

Some tips for this:

* Make sure your friends know what you do - update your Facebook profile, hand out business cards, start a blog, etc.

* Make sure your friends think/know that you are the best developer that they know and that you are the first person they think of when someone says "I'm going to need a website"

* Use LinkedIn - surprisingly enough, I've had old contacts connect with me via LinkedIn, view my profile and hire me for a project

* Exploit whatever niche you're a part of - if you are active in your church, approach them or another local church to see if they need a site. Apply same strategy for a youth group, social club, etc.

From a network of people who work in real businesses who know what you do and that you want to book gigs (and subtly, that you'll take care of them in a meaningful way if they bring you work that you book)

From personal and professional networks. Work at BigCo or Startup or wherever for a while, make connections with real people, don't sabotage your reputation with shoddy work or burned bridges, then transition to contract work for the people you know, advertise yourself so you can freelance work from people you don't, self-incorporate/brand yourself/etc. It can't be done overnight, but very little worth doing can.

I'm in the Midwest US and I've used RentACoder (now vWorker) but you have to be careful. The key is to cherry pick specialty work that you can do quickly and still charge a reasonable fee for. In my case, I do almost exclusively hardware designs that I can knock out in a few minutes. Simple stuff, but I rarely get more than $250 or so. There is more involved work available, but I refuse to work for $10/hour!

I've bid on only three projects in the past year and been outbid on 2, 1 is pending.

It's actually not that hard to get good clients on Guru and the sites you mention. You just need to differentiate from that Russian kid on something other than price.

Back in my eLance days, I charged $75/hour for my time and wrote good thoughtful proposals for jobs that sounded interesting. Those two things set me so far apart from the rest of the field that potential clients would essentially have two piles of proposals on their desk:

- Pile A: 100 broken english canned proposals quoting $14/hr and dripping with flakiness

- Pile B: 1 proposal from the expensive guy who sounds like he knows what he's doing

So the thought process then changes to "do I take a risk, or do I spend the money to do the job right". I'd only hear back from 1 in 10 proposals, but the conversation was always the same from there:

"Wow, you really nailed what we're looking for, but, well, you're a bit expensive. Any chance you can give us a break on price?"

"No."

"OK, well we've talked it over and we think we'd like to give it a shot."

Why not "charge" $90 per hour and then offer to "come down" to $75?

Why open the door to negotiation? If you're in a position to charge $75/hr with confidence, then charge $75/hour. With confidence.

I think you missed my point. Charging "$90 per hour," some people will just give you that; that's obviously better for you. There will still be people who hope to get a discount, and now $75 seems like you're doing them a special favor.

I rarely do anything below $5k (at $125 per hour with discounts on bigger projects or past clients that treated me well).

Since this all side stuff, after my 9-5 job, I'm very picky on what I take in, since I like to work on products that I have 'real' input in.

What area? Web Dev?

Looks like Mobile Dev, if this is him:

http://twitter.com/eekfuh

http://www.deliciousmorsel.com/

Yes that is me. Its mobile and user interface web stuff.

I usually charge $75-$100 an hour for .NET development (in the midwest).

The high and low ends vary greatly. I've done little one hour wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am gigs and then I've done projects that run 4-6 months and bring in 5 figures. On average I'd say about $5000. The most I ever brought in on a single project was $24,000. BTW those projects were all done using the .NET Framework. Take THAT, Expensify!

Just trying to make sense of the data points here... Your username and the description of your one hour gig leads me to believe that your projects need more than just programming skills. Do you work in San Fernando valley?

I work in the Detroit area actually. The handful of one hour contract jobs I've done have been pure maintenance coding (i.e. bug fixes on existing applications, reports modifications, etc.)

Thanks. Sorry, my whole comment was a juvenile joke implying pr0n industry. It fell flat.

Wow. Went right over my head. Is San Fernando known for pr0n? The Detroit equivalent would be 8 Mile.

Yep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Adult_enter...

"... nearly 90% of all legally distributed pornographic films made in the United States are either filmed in or produced by studios based in the San Fernando Valley"

I usually charge $10,000 per gig, 4-6 hour work. If you are good at something charge more, others may do the same for $500, you can either charge 10 customers at $500, or charge $10000, believe me 6 out of the same 10 will pay u $10000.

>I usually charge $10,000 per gig, 4-6 hour work

that's $1600/ hour. Are you kidding me ?

its not about /hour charge, its about the work. The work is getting done, it may take 2 hours or 6 hours. People will pay you, if you are really good at some type of development. Have a portfolio to show. Sartups are heavily funded and want to spend money, they will get tax deduction for paying freelancers, so target startups and show your work, you will get paid high bucks, startups want the work done now and are ready to pay the VC money and they know they will be getting results as expected from a guy how charges ridiculously high rate.

I have been on my own for over a decade and tend not to take a job that is less than 6 weeks work. All .NET work for customers at all different market segments and the rate varies from 110-195/hr.

How do you know your skills are good enough to take on a $XXXX project? I've never done freelance work, but I would love to start doing some work after school and earn a few bucks along the way.

One way: have you ever delivered something which someone would pay $X,000 for? If so, then you are good enough to deliver something someone would pay $X,000 for.

I think many people get hung up on skill though. Clients pay for many, many things. Skill is only one of those things, and it doesn't dominate, either. Clients can also pay for:

  criticality of work
  urgency of work
  guaranteed availability
  hard-to-find expertise
  communication skills
  perceived attentiveness to needs
  lower perceived risk
  corporate politics
  measurable results
  warm fuzzy feeling

Of these, if you could only have one, I'd probably go with the ability to give clients the warm fuzzy feeling. You will never go hungry if clients get the warm fuzzy feeling from working with you.

Hat tip to tptacek, who taught me the importance of some of the above.

This is totally in line with my experience (own a web design/dev shop). We talk about the "warm fuzzy feeling" in terms of making other people look good.

- make your clients look good to their stakeholders

- make someone look good to their manager

- make an exec look good to their board

- make the firm subcontracting to you look good to the end-client

- make your teammates/collaborators look good (and help them save face when they screw up)

Also, ask someone else how much they'd pay for your work. I found that since I make websites myself, I tend to value the work a lot less because it seems easier to me. In reality, the work is very valuable to people who are not capable of doing it themselves, so they're usually willing to pay more for it than you are. And as usual patio11 is spot on in regards to those qualities, having strength in those areas can give you a powerful edge in winning over clients.

I want to learn the arts of warm fuzzy feeling. Please elaborate :)

A good place to start would be this article: http://unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

For me, I know my ability to learn whatever I need to in order to complete the project. Most of the time, a client will approach me and say "Can you do x, y, and z for this project?" While I can do x and y just fine, I know full well that I haven't the slightest idea about z -- but I still say "yes." I then do a little bit of research on the topic and get back to them with an estimate. I then have a strong motivation to learn 'z' to be able to complete the project and get paid, and will also have gained a valuable skill that I'll be able to leverage in the future.

Freelancers hired by BigCos (so not working from home) usually get paid by the hour/day and can easily take home 10k+ a month. Most of the time theres lots of travelling involved though.

Rule of thumb is to estimate hours and a reasonable rate given the scope and time of the arrangement. It's hard to pin down an absolute number, but in terms of rate I dont consider it unless its at least $200/hr

My first major paid freelance project was worth about $6K of development time. I charged $400 because it was for a friend of a friend, and mostly because I just didn't know any better.

I learned a hell of a lot though, not just about coding but also what I could do different in the future not to land myself in such a crap situation.

Eventually, though, that $400 paid dividends: the project was noticed by a company that offered me a full-time position, which I love and meets all my needs and wants financially.

Moral of my story: sometime crap pays off.

I guess most of us started with too low prices. Me too, and I was cursing that shitty job. Until some time later I realized that it was worth it - I learned a lot from my first job. Not only about pricing too low but also about handling difficult clients.

I'm glad my first job(s) were shitty so I could grow a thick skin early in my career.

I graduated out of school in 2010 May.

I have been trying doing a lot of freelance gigs that range around $500 - $2000 (5 such gigs)

Plus a lot of small stuff ranging from $50 - $100 (2 each every fortnight)

I pick up work from ODesk, and some other sites like ScriptLance and also know some clients via private contacts.

I'm looking to move into per hour billing from fixed price. Anybody made that exact transition yet? And how do you talk to your existing clients when you want to make the switch?

Would be interesting to see what the average time spent is on projects at each income level.

It would be even more interesting if we could factor in location as well. I live in Utah and $125 hourly is decent, but in SV it is probably rock bottom.

I'm in Utah too -- $125/hour is more than decent considering our cost of living.

Where/how do you find these freelance gigs?

I'd say 85%+ of the better paying gigs I've gotten have been through existing connections and people I've known. For instance, a college friend started a new business and needed a site - he contacted and ended up hiring me. His partner then referred me to his friend, who also hired me for a project. Word of mouth can be pivotal in building a business so my first suggestion would be to explore your own social circle. (give your friends business cards!)

Same story here. Partner and I did a fairly complex micro-lending platform for a non-profit as our first major gig. Some of the work was pro-bono, some $35/hour range. We did well, gave them what they needed, and now we're booked with clients for the next six months from referrals and others who wanted to work with us based on that site. We've moved comfortably into the $60-80 range with pretty clear indications that we can keep pushing it higher.

My blog helped me but mainly connections and returning clients. I do Facebook application development.

I have a biz partner that finds them because he has the connections. Though we did get one gig because someone found something I'd written on my tech blog.

I'm not sure how to answer that - I do my work hourly, usually. For that, I'm usually at $85/hour, although I discount it for projects that will take several months where I don't have to look around for the next job. I probably would have started increasing that rate, except now I've got a fulltime job and aren't contracting after this month.

Two simple iPhone apps at £500 and £900. One freebie one which brings in £15/month.

Need to charge more!

This is the advice I offer to all of my freelancing friends and repeat to myself every morning: "Whatever I'm charging, I should double it."

There's a limit on that school of thought, but if have the option of 2 freelancing contacts at X, or 1 at 2x, I prefer to focus on one client at a higher price point.

I figured out my starting freelance rate by taking my per-hour salary from my day job and doubling it. Then, whenever I had too many clients at that price level (generally 2+ back-to-back) I increased my rate by 50% to 100%.

This has worked great for me through multiple iterations. As my portfolio, contacts, and experience grows, so does my rate. I'm left earning a good amount for my freelance work, and have the luxury of turning down work that isn't paying enough or is too much of a hassle to coordinate.

Can you contact me (email in profile) or add a contact yourself?

I mostly work on a day rate, not a per-project rate. Can you create a poll for average day rates?

As a student, entrepreneur, and frequent payer of bills, I tend to take on small gigs under $200 whenever my time allows. This way I can get in and get out quickly, not have to devote too much mental energy to the client, and be able to block myself out from clients while I am working on my own project or studying.

For me this yields the highest dollar per minute spent working and allows for the least amount of stress. Because I work quickly and have accustomed myself to this system, most clients are pleasantly surprised when they receive a product on the same day the project was requested at a higher quality than most other designers they've worked with.

Most efforts are at $5-10K for our market segment per project and a yearly of $1500 and up

How do all of you guys find clients for web development jobs. I've heard that some of the freelancing sites are kind of cheap and I'm also worried that without design skills it would be difficult to create a decent web application.

My last two freelance jobs involved two freelancers: one developer and one designer (who might also be a front end developer). This allowed a considerable amount of parallelization, but it can get messy if the split between the workload is not well-defined. I've always been on the development end of the workload and finding work hasn't been hard so far.

Working as a software engineer I sometimes do work for less than 2k but I consider this more of a favor. Typical work is 5-20k but any major projects (anything that takes more than 4 weeks of free time) are 55-75k.

Most useful software will need to be built in 6 to 8 weeks. - The first iteration. 10k+ should therefore get the maximum votes. More informational poll would have included 8-12 12-16 16-20 k.

More often than not: $0. :D I mean they are supposed to pay me in the $200-1600 range, but actually getting clients to fork up money for a completed job is difficult, to the point where I'm ready to give up and get a regular job.

I don't generally do jobs for less than $200 though. It takes times to do research, switch environmental and your head around, but clients sometimes think I'm a typist and should only be paid for time on the keyboard.

You really need a better class of client. A couple of things that I have learned: 1) you are more likely to get paid by big companies because the person writing the cheque isn't spending their own money, 2) you are more likely to get paid by people you meet face-to-face because its easier to be an asshole over the internet, 3) bizarrely you are more likely to get paid if you charge more because it weeds out all the penny pinchers. The last one is really important. Just by charging more you put yourself in a different market, one which is generally more professional.

Don't you ask for milestone payments?

It makes more sense to ask about the hourly average per freelancing gig. After all, the duration of freelance gigs may vary widely depending on the size of the gig.

I would love to hear how you guys got your gigs? I'm looking to do something on the side but haven't been able to find anything concrete.

It does depend what you do, and how you do it, but the results suggest that your scale needs to go a lot higher; typical London contract rates for say Java development are about $700 a day, tend to last 3 / 6 months, e.g. $42-84k. Probably 2/3rds of that if you are a js dev, or 2x that if you know your investment banking and grid computing.

actually 2x a bit of an exaggeration, more like 1.5x

I tend to intentionally take smaller projects, because I find the variety more interesting than working on the same thing for months on end, so it's rare that I get single projects over about $8k (most of them are in the $4-6 range), but that's because I'm not going after bigger ones.

Sadly this poll does not say much... what the heck is an 'average' freelance job? How complex is it (can anyone do it)? How much time or how many people does it take to complete? How harsh are the deadlines? ....

Daily rates used in estimations may be more relevant in this case...

One gig so far at about $1500. A nice average, but not indicative of a trend.

Looks like you should use logarithmic buckets and make them go higher.

Is there a good site you guys prefer when looking for freelance work? I've never done side projects for cash but it sounds fun and I could use the cash.

Does this not all depend what kind of job it is? Front-end, backend, modules, etc...

I'd be curious to know if there are any design freelancers that do infographics, and what they charge...

We've had trouble finding great infographic designers that don't take a lot of time to manage, and I'm wondering if we should be paying more.

If interested in that or doing UI/UX stuff, check us out http://feefighters.com and drop me a note

EDIT - looks like people are interested! job posting for fulltime UI/UX here : http://feefighters.com/jobs/ui-designer-developer/

and Freelance infographic posting here: http://www.genuinejobs.com/jobs_detail.php?id=5606 (but just drop an email to josh@feefighters.com instead of responding to this one)

Will send you an e-mail but wanted to post this here as others might find it useful as well. I charge $75 per hour for UI/UX design work, meaning wireframe mockups, full-fledged Photoshop mockups and XHTML/CSS/JS conversion. It may be low considered to some standards (San Fran) but I'd rather increase my rate slowly while building a bigger clientele base than risk charging too much and not having enough work.

For those curious about the workflow, I use:

* Google Docs to create a spreadsheet with all project research/notes that is shared with client

* MockFlow to handle wireframe mockups, as it also allows me to easily share them with the client AND is cheap (I think $70 per year?)

* Photoshop and Illustrator to create the main mockups for each of the major pages/sections of the site

I also tend to shy away from logo design, as for me it is not worth the time and effort for the pay - instead I suggest to my clients that they use a service like 99Designs or Brandstack.

I actually am an information graphics guy - classically trained in the hard-scrabble world of print journalism, but I'm now refining my interaction design skills at an enterprise UX organization. I just sent you an E-mail via Hacker News Users :)

$0 - $500 is for the elance/odesk people I guess?

Could we get the outcome of the poll please? Thanks!

umm... see that bit under the vote which says "xxx points"? That's how many many voted for that item!

I rarely work on a freelance project :)

I hate to be Debbie Downer, but discussions like this where people post what they charge their customers can get dangerously close to violating price fixing laws, especially if the purpose is for sellers to get justification to raise their rates. Ford isn't allowed to call up GM and ask how much they're going to charge for a pickup truck next year, and if they do they aren't allowed to raise their launch price because they think they can get away with it.

Of course, when the prices are published things change (like if a supermarket sees that another supermarket raised their price for milk), but this type of a forum with sellers chatting about what to charge seems like a grey area.

IANAL, but please be cautious.

Price fixing laws where? This is site caters to an international audience, dollars can be converted to any currency and we're not all part of one industry.

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