Technical & Scientific > Programming
Web Dev Hourly Rate?
micah:
Interesting.
realworld, crowdsourced freelance rates by type of work, skill set and location: https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates
According to that, my $75 rate is more than reasonable :)
ober:
I wonder what the sample size on that is. If you look at the people taking jobs on most freelance sites, the hourly rates are FAR under that.
micah:
yeah, looking into it, their data comes from people using their service which is mostly still in beta. Their service is just for invoicing and billing, verses those freelancers job posting sites were everyone has to outbid each other to get clients who don't want to pay more than minimum wage. On the flip side, people who freelance full time for a living have to include all their overhead in their rates. They need to get a livable wage and pay all their bills, insurance, taxes, etc off the freelance work. Completely different from people who do work on the side for extra income.
3 of my coworkers do side work, one of them just design/front-end work; they all charge in the $75/hr range and seem to do just fine.
hans:
I think the rough calculation is usually about 30% overhead for handling all of your own stuff (taxes, insurance, etc) so from $75/hr that drops it to something more like $50/hr equivalent which means it would be roughly equivalent to working a $100k/yr gig if you worked full-time at that rate. Not too bad.
Bear in mind though if you're not working full-time or fully booked you'll generally want to bump your rate up. And typically the shorter the engagement the higher the rate. One off work can also be a bit higher since there's a limited time you're needed for.
The bigger thing is clients want to pay as little as possible, usually, and sometime you need to ask yourself if a client that doesn't have the money to pay what you want is actually a client you want to have. Sometimes they can be the ones that will take much more of your time, trying to get the most value for their money.
Start higher with room to negotiate (give a range you're comfortable with) and if the low end still isn't good for them and scares them away you can usually use that as a good indicator.
micah:
So I actually just landed a new client for (what will hopefully be) some long term work. He didn't question my $75/hr rate.
On a side note, I used that Bonsai service to write up the contract and e-sign it. Their contract service is pretty sweet and totally free. I sent my client the link and within minutes he had e-signed it too.
They also let you do invoicing and payments through them for a nominal fee. I might check that service out later, but the contract part was cool enough. Check it out at https://www.hellobonsai.com/invite/6fb630df (if you sign up after using that link I get a $5 credit to try out some of their paid services)
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