Hacker News Reader

Bill by the hour, unless you want lots of bucks. If you do, suck it up and learn to go fixed price. I never had the guts to do it.

Hourly billing is not perfect. There are lots of ways to screw it up too. The author should have told you that.

Work any better? I've been told I ramble. Hope that helps.

View on HN

One way to screw hourly billing: you feel compromised to stay in a project until it's closed, but the project hasn't a close date, so it might never be properly closed. But you might actually want to get out of it to do some other interesting or more expensive work, and if your client feels like it, he/she might never really free you from your project. That's one danger of hourly billing for hourly beginners.

My first "pro" hourly gig ended up going week-to-week with no end in sight. We were doing a great job, but the VP who was paying us was fighting with another VP over who owned the program. After 2 months I had enough and left. A year later the team was still there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com