Charge your clients like a boss

Indeed. But doing quality "break a nail" type work for a month, and then sending a big invoice at the end that gets paid without argument, feels so good you'll want to do it again.

Tell me about it.

First system I did for a company took 6 weeks of nights and weekends and I charged 1500 quid (pounds), I was working for minimum wage (long boring story, been programming since I was 7) and it seemed an insane amount of money (it was effectively two months pay after tax back then).

It ran for 4 years with no changes (still running).

They rang me up about a year ago wanting a new different system, spec'd it out with them, figured two week build time (in those 4 years I'd gone from working retail to running my own business as a development consultant), quoted 6000 quid (pounds) and a month and they accepted immediately.

That system has been in production a year with one bug.

I'd learnt in those four years that programmers than can deliver a reliable solution to a business need on time and on budget are worth a bit more than 250 a week.

So true. Though I think a lot of the insecurity comes from not knowing what is actually the norm. When I started out I thought people were kidding, that it was all a big joke, when they told me their hourly wages. Turns out you actually need to bump your prices up quite a bit for it to compensate for all "non-work" stuff.

I'm hoping this article can however slightly help shift the norm for some newly started developer, so maybe they can take the step and ask for more.