Ask HN: New to freelance, better to charge per hour or per project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: New to freelance, better to charge per hour or per project?

5 pointstswartz7 comments

I'm new to freelance front end web development and started to offer my services to build basic websites for friends and others. I was thinking of charging by the hour with a minimum dollar total for the project. What do you think is best?

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I usually just say:

There are 3 types of guarantees I could make you:

1. Guaranteed features

2. Guaranteed timeline

3. Guaranteed cost

But you can only pick two!

If they pick #1 and #3, then I charge per project, but they don't get the final quote until they agree on the full spec in excruciating detail. The build then takes as long as it takes. In my experience people choose this option 90% of the time.

If they pick #1 and #2, then I charge hourly: and I work however many hours a day I need to, to guarantee the timeline and features. I don't really need them to agree to the spec in this situation, because scope-creep just means more billable hours every week.

If they pick #2 and #3, then I charge per project, and I tell them to prioritize their feature-requests in order of importance. I build the project and add features in the order they requested, and when time runs out I turn the site on, regardless of how many features are done. In this way, I'm technically charging per project, but it's really just my hourly rate multiplied by the capped number of hours.

For the past 18 months we have been charging weekly rates per resource, but starting in January we are going back to an hourly model for most projects. The problem we found was that even at a weekly rate clients do not have the same sense of urgency to finish a project as they do when you are billing them hourly, nor do they seem to value your time as much. So while we did get one desired affect of people feeling like we were more part of the "team", we also received a few undesirable effects, worst being clients abusing/misusing our time.

While you will hear some objections over hourly, they are all easily answered and simple enough to spin into positives for both client and yourself. Stick with hourly, set minimums if you desire and move forward. Don't think about it too much.

thanks. that's a good point about clients not valuing time as much when its not hourly.

anytime, good luck and have fun.

Per hour, with a minimum number of hours. Fixed-bid (per project) is a sucker's game, and you can sell your clients on per-hour like this:

"Some clients, not you of course, will take advantage of a fixed bid to waste everybody's time tweaking things that don't matter, or expanding the scope beyond what was originally intended or agreed upon. If I were to accept fixed-bid contracts, I'd have to heavily charge more than what I figure it will actually cost to make up for the people who will abuse the contract like that. The only way for me to be fair with you is to ask for a fair price per-hour. That way the clients who do want to waste my time can pay for it, and those that don't waste my time can save money."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850335

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802

For small projects, bill per day. For large projects, bill per week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355

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