My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.
I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more towards weekly over time).
> “Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.”
The specific case I was referring to was a series seed funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years ago. They’ve since rebuilt everything in house and are doing very well now.
But don’t take that to mean you can just walk in and ask for money. People still want to know who they’re investing in. Prior track record is key.
Once they have 3+ programmers working full time, they'll be spending _at least_ $15k every single week on their site/app -- likely way more. Save them even a single near-future month of crap-rewriting, "switching frameworks", infrastructure headaches, "one-click signup", getting their shaky foundations sorted out, etc., and it's a very clear win.
I've seen founder and first contractor tech debt that was really hurting the business take _a year_ to clear out, because once the business is running at all, you can't just swap out the engine. Heck, I've seen it take 5 years! Making the right choice today can really change their whole outcome, from struggling or closing to thriving -- and a bad contractor is not the right choice. (etc...)
You have to show them: your rate is just a demonstration of your value. If they pick you, they're gonna be laughing all the way to the bank.
That's one possibility. Another, and one that I think is more common with startups (majority are people using their own savings and family/friends, not raising millions from seed rounds) is that they really didn't have that much money up front, but paying a cheaper way allowed them to minimally get a product out the door until they had enough revenue to "do it right."
If they remember you as dependable and all-around competent, they would be thrilled to be able to deploy their budget against the problem nearly instantly.
IMO, build something for you and sell it vs building something for other people.
You know that trope all startup people say "raise your prices and get rid of the low value high cost customers"
Same thing.
> how you find clients
Word of mouth & referrals from existing clients
> what software stacks you work with
Next.js
React-Query
Prisma
Tailwind CSS
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
Caddy
In contrast, I've quoted hundreds of dollars an hour while explaining that I didn't think I would offer enough value to actually justify that price in context and encouraged alternatives- and got the job immediately. And the project went very smoothly. In another recent case, I requested tens of thousands of dollars for some project-relevant expenditures, and received a deposit without a single question.
Organizations that are willing to spend money tend to be the ones that understand what they're buying and how to value it.
Big Cos pay high rates often with less aggressive demands, however, the quote above is 'build a business from start to finish' which is something else entirely.
That said contracts like that in my case were short term and tightly scoped, usually 6 months long and with very specific objectives. Areas of expertise I've hired people for were security/cryptography, custom database development/optimizations and network optimization (ie. Infiniband).
I mean if you enjoy that stuff by all means do it, but I prefer to build real stuff that make impact not practice showmanship.
In my personal experience everything except infrastructure and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols, business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater need for generalists.
I think some heuristic like "earn double a FAANG income" isn't going to go over well with companies that are getting off the ground. Are the companies stupid for not paying that? Maybe sometimes. But there are definitely way more companies willing to hire someone at $200/hr than at $500/hr.
The calculations are just different for the companies. An operation spending $1B gains a lot by shaving off 1% (and small improvements are not strictly in the domain of specialists). But a new venture with $0 in revenue may have a very real risk of running out of cash one day, even if their product idea is great and well-built. "Hire the best people in the world" seems more prudent for a company who is certain it will pay off.
But to be fair, I guess one should occasionally try asking for high amounts anyways. I think jaquesm had recommended aiming to have 50% of your clients turn you down on the basis of price, to find the sweet spot for a rate.
No, generalists typically get pigeonholed into being specialists, and typically not the field they were the strongest.
For example I'm stronger in backend/devops than frontend, but because I do most of my work in Node.js, more specifically Next.js I'm always billed as a frontend dev, so typical companies just want me to do one thing.
Contracts like generalization because I cover more surface area with relatively smaller costs than paying $150k+ for each role I can do.
Both my rates and this keeps people who aren’t serious about working with me away. Anyone else is most likely worth my time and the cost is acceptable because I don’t work a full 40/hr week for the client. I plan the work to be done for a week and let them know. If it takes me 40hrs ok but most don’t.
They’re not paying me for hours logged. They’re paying me for my experience and skills.
For the OP it's probably a lot more dealing with clients and building stuff from the ground up which you don't tend to do at FAANG at all. I'm not saying it's not as important, it's just very different skill wise.
... if you say 'product', then ok.
The 'product' part for many businesses is often very easy to do; sales, channel development, marketing etc. which lead to making a 'business' is the hard part.
If you're opening up major clients, or large numbers of small clients through channel sales then you're really worth something.
How does that work?
Business plan, hiring, locale, factory, ???? , ERP, ?
Or "your website" ?
I feel I could definitely build a project myself, but I find FE to be very time consuming.
And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin?
Referrals from existing clients, HN monthly threads.
> And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin?
$10k/week, pre-paid monthly. I don't do hourly because I don't work hourly. You're paying for my skills and expertise not the geo coordinates of the chair I am sitting in for however long I am working. I charge accordingly.
The price is for your slot in my workload and that is it. Need maintenance then you pay me weekly for any maintenance work.
React-Query
Prisma
Tailwind CSS
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
Caddy
https://github.com/aniftyco/next-saas
I open source as much as I can tbh: https://github.com/aniftyco