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.

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.