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Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

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Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#101

Post by Loic »

mohsen wrote: post #53
Loic wrote: post #18

Working in the chemical engineering area. Hard science + all the cool technologies you can read on HN => Fun + money. Usually a contract starts at $15k (2 weeks) and goes up to 2 months of work on average. I always advice people to go the hard science way if they like computer science, because there is a really big big lack of people being good at both. I should write about it.

that brings up a question for me. when you say $15K/2weeks, is that for a task that can be accomplished by a single person (2x40h), or do you have to break the job up amongst other people?

Just me, it is usually complex stuff where only one person or two in tandem can do the work. I would be pleased to be able to offload some of the work to other people, but it is hard to find people having the right skills — the niche effect, few skilled people.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#102

Post by gabrielroth »

thrashr888 wrote: post #99
ChuckMcM wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, yes he's much happier. He's much happier with the adjusted workload and it hasn't really changed his annual income all that much (perhaps a bit more income but a lot less work). Life is, to all outward extents, both more manageable and less stressful. He still undercharges his friends :-)

I think you still didn't directly answer the question. I'll assume (just a guess from your comment) he increased his rates?

He's much happier with the adjusted workload and it hasn't really changed his annual income all that much (perhaps a bit more income but a lot less work).

Do the math.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#105

Post by billybob »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #52

My Dad is an engraver, he's good at it, he was complaining to me that he had more work than he could handle. I suggested he raise his price then. He responded with the typical "I couldn't in good conscience charge that for something that takes me only a few hours to do!" And then we had a long discussion about how the market sets the rate, not you, and if you hold your rate under market it will overwhelm you because…

Yeah. It's weird to think about making a lot of money for a small amount of work, but it does make sense in the market.

I mean, if 16 people are willing to pay for an hour of your time on Monday, and you're only going to work 8 hours, how do you decide which lucky 8 people get your services? 1) First come first serve? 2) Pick 8 at random? 3) Pick the 8 who want it most?

#3 is most easily measured in "dollars they will pay," so you raise your price. Of course, it also favors the wealthy, so if you feel badly about that, do some pro bono or find a way to provide tiers of service at different prices.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#106

Post by dools »

This poll seems to be doin it rong. I couldn't put a single figure on it and say "I won't get out of bed for less than this" because so long as my hourly rate is satisfactory, I'll do 30 minutes work and bill someone for it.

I work out my hourly rate like this:

There are about 219 work days in a year after leave and entitlements. As a freelancer I'll probably stay billable 3/5 of those and on average I can hope for 6 effective billable hours per day, so there are about 788 billable hours per year.

I then think of my target yearly salary and divide by number of billable hours per year. I actually have some indirect overheads, too so I add a margin on that, but if you're straight up freelance you may not need to.

That's your base rate. So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes) you can work for 30 minutes, charge for half an hour, issue the invoice and be done with it.

If I get a longer contract, I usually reduce the hourly rate commensurately by increasing the ratio of billable to non-billable hours I'm expecting in that year as a result.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#107

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jerryblack wrote: post #43

I have looked at sites like odesk or elance and those just suck for US freelancers as they do not pay shit. No one can outbid some russian company charging $3 per hour. Where do you go to find projects?

I'm in the Midwest US and I've used RentACoder (now vWorker) but you have to be careful. The key is to cherry pick specialty work that you can do quickly and still charge a reasonable fee for. In my case, I do almost exclusively hardware designs that I can knock out in a few minutes. Simple stuff, but I rarely get more than $250 or so. There is more involved work available, but I refuse to work for $10/hour!

I've bid on only three projects in the past year and been outbid on 2, 1 is pending.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#108

Post by xinsight »

saranagati wrote: post #100
zackb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you go about doing estimation? When you are asked for a bid and have loose requirements what are some good practices for estimating?

it amazes me how few people who do contract work create a requirement docs. Before you even give the potential client a quote, create a requirement doc of every little feature that will be included in the project. Then show it to the client to make sure nothing has been missed or out of scope. Once you have this list you can accurately estimate how long each little piece will be to do. Add in the time it takes to cre…

The problem is often that the work is not clearly defined. Sitting down and thinking about the project, what the client asked for vs. what they really need, listing the unknowns, doing some tests to validate an approach... this can take a lot of time.

What I want to start doing with projects that aren't clearly defined, is to simply do an initial contract to nail down some of these details. Build a prototype, do some tests and write a detailed spec - and then the next contract will be building it for real. (Maybe with some inexpensive outsourcing.)

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#109

Post by dotBen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #52

My Dad is an engraver, he's good at it, he was complaining to me that he had more work than he could handle. I suggested he raise his price then. He responded with the typical "I couldn't in good conscience charge that for something that takes me only a few hours to do!" And then we had a long discussion about how the market sets the rate, not you, and if you hold your rate under market it will overwhelm you because…

This is capitalism 101.

Funny thing is, my parents (who are both near-retirement service providers in their own professions) won't adopt such a model in either direction (raising their rates or decreasing their rates based on workload).

They also just recently chastised my brother (who is in his mid-20s) for doing an arbitrage play where he could get a plentiful supply of iPad 2's on discount and sell them above market rate on eBay.

Threads like this remind me that I wasn't bought up in a capitalist family.

Re: Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?

#110

Post by naner »

patio11 wrote: post #25

One lesson I learned this year as a newbie consultant: there is a heck of a lot of dynamic range in that top bucket. It's like software: even if everyone you know pays $5 or $10 or $30 for software, don't necessarily let that set your expectations, because software can get arbitrarily expensive.

Like $40 million for a simple paywall.
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