Shameless plug here but we’re building an AI tool to help with this problem! Launching in the next few weeks, check it out if you’re interested - hourlyrate.ai.
Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
131–140 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#132Shameless plug but I’ve been a freelancer for many years now and struggled with this exact problem. So I’m launching an ai based tool to help out with it. Check it out if you’re interested - https://hourlyrate.ai/
Launching in a few weeks
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#133I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it. They think in hours (or days) not some subdivision of them. And yes, thinking about work is the same as doing the work. It's all billable time. As far as your rate, I always bill as high as I can without pushback. Where is that level? Yo…
Yeah, this works for me. One option I did early on was run a Pomodoro timer and bill every half hour, but a client brought up that I should also be charging for the hours I spend in traffic on the way to a meeting.
My wife once asked why I bill $115/hour and not a round number like $120 or $100? How did I get the 5? I just kept raising rates to say no to jobs I didn't feel like doing, and found a point where I got the jobs I wanted.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Many of my best ideas have come to me in the shower, on a walk and even in the middle of the night. It's ridiculous to say you should have a stopwatch with you at all times, so daily billing it is. If they don't want to that, just assign 8 hours as a full day and stop worrying of you reach them or not.
There is a science component to ideas in the shower. I read somewhere that the shower puts you into a similar state to the waking/sleeping transition that people like Einstein tried to ride by sitting and holding something heavy and loud, so if the slipped too far towards sleep they'd drop it and wake themselves up. I don't have any references to where I heard that though. Similar lines, I read about some earlish com…
Didn’t know Einstein was holding my mixtape.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#135[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#136I see by the comments that a lot of intelligent people do not understand billing ethics. There are many layers of relationship, and your relationship will truly define the nuances of your billing process. However regarding your question, there are a few considerations which determine when you are being “flexible” and when billing becomes corrupt (if you are not objectively providing value you are stealing.) Are you i…
Here's a thought exercise I would like to put to test sometime. Let's say I would like to make USD 200 000 a year as a contracted sotware engineer. And I would like to try billing 10 hours a week. Take 6 weeks off a year, so this is 46 weeks. And that's 460 hours I will try to bill. To make 200 000, I must bill USD 435 per that hour.
The deal would be: I bill you for 10 hours, and you can be sure I worked hard for those 10 hours. I probably worked 40 hours, but I bill you 10. But that's the going rate.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work as a project manager , where we had a large pool of vetted freelancers. You'd select the type of work, specify the price and the system would send a mass email to those- whoever accepts first, gets the job. Most of our clients were banks or investment funds. The company was providing translation services. So a fund gets to update one word in one of their files and it does happen in 12 different languag…
Transperfect?
Nope, but they were a competitor.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Many of my best ideas have come to me in the shower, on a walk and even in the middle of the night. It's ridiculous to say you should have a stopwatch with you at all times, so daily billing it is. If they don't want to that, just assign 8 hours as a full day and stop worrying of you reach them or not.
There is a science component to ideas in the shower. I read somewhere that the shower puts you into a similar state to the waking/sleeping transition that people like Einstein tried to ride by sitting and holding something heavy and loud, so if the slipped too far towards sleep they'd drop it and wake themselves up. I don't have any references to where I heard that though. Similar lines, I read about some earlish com…
Alan Kay has often said that he gets his best ideas in the shower (I think the idea for efficiently implementing overlapping windows was one of them). I can't remember where I read it but he asked for a shower in his office at PARC but they said no (but he nevertheless stayed on).
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#139I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it. They think in hours (or days) not some subdivision of them. And yes, thinking about work is the same as doing the work. It's all billable time. As far as your rate, I always bill as high as I can without pushback. Where is that level? Yo…
> I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. I deal with a lot of contractors. To be clear: If I asked for a single task that takes 5 minutes and they bill me an hour for it, that's 100% fine in my book. Context switching, recording, billing, etc. aren't free. The difference between a 60-minute bill and a 10-minute bill is nothing. Let's…
As someone that takes longer to do things than most due to ADHD issues, here's what I did:
I knew generally how long something should take. So, I would track my hours for sure, but I would reduce the final hours to be roughly what it should have been.
Everyone was happy this way.
Discounting your hourly rate and taking too long looks really bad. Keeping the rate high and discounting your hours looks normal to great.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#140> I guess what I meant to say, is lowering my rate by around 25%, but also being less picky on what I should bill before so that I can earn the same amount, acceptable? Yes, it's fine, you should pad one of them. Either rate or time. Even if you just log in to a 1 hour meeting they host, bill them for 1.25-1.50 hours for context switching/ "prep work" is pretty acceptable. It is going to be client specific, if you fi…
Well, typically people like to see billing for hours used... so... If you work today: 8 hours billed. If you work part of the day: part hours billed If you work overtime: 8 hours + OT hours. I agree with conductr that this is creative work. If you talk to someone to gather requirements, do meetings, help teammates out, etc, it is all part of the process. If you need to look up stuff that is part of the process. Just…
Agree padding the rate is more common than padding hours for these reasons.