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assuming that your .net and RoR app took less than a year to finish and you're not killing yourself with the hours (around 40/wk), it sounds like you're doing fine.
A freelancer's wage is different from a salaryman's wage - health insurance dollars and the "self-employment tax" are two sizable bites to take into consideration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A freelancer's wage is different from a salaryman's wage - health insurance dollars and the "self-employment tax" are two sizable bites to take into consideration.
Both of those "bites" are true, but what the market is compensating you for is risk, not overhead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A freelancer's wage is different from a salaryman's wage - health insurance dollars and the "self-employment tax" are two sizable bites to take into consideration.
Both of those "bites" are true, but what the market is compensating you for is risk, not overhead.
I billed at AUD 75/hour as a Windows admin when 17. Now GBP 550/day at 28 as a Linux architect and infrastructure software developer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I see what you mean. It probably took about 1000 hours total, but spanned over a period of a year. So maybe 20 hours per week. I was just learning Rails at the time, so it took a bit longer than it otherwise would have. I could probably make what I made in about 1 to 2 months tops now.
100000$ for two months work seems like a good price.
100k/year gross working only 20 hours a week is pretty badass if you ask me. The average (full-time) web developer salary according to salary.com is 70k/year.
Just for the sake of giving us more information, would you be willing to compare your RoR app with a website I made a while ago. I got paid $500 to make http://www.solafcars.com (works in multiple languages, includes an admin panel, everything on the site is editable). I would assume your RoR app was much bigger, but let us know how it compares. I know I got underpaid though.
assuming that your .net and RoR app took less than a year to finish and you're not killing yourself with the hours (around 40/wk), it sounds like you're doing fine.
150,000/yr (~75/hr) is low.
http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresu...
The average full-time web developer salary is 70k. I'm not saying I don't want to make $150k+, but I just can't find any way to substantiate the claim that I'm worth that much.
How do you actually achieve market prices?
I'm aware that there are massive differences in how much you can charge based on location, but I still feel I'm hitting more resistance to my asking prices than I should be. As far as I can tell, it's not a quality issue. I've had repeat business from almost all my past customers and none of the others were unhappy as far as I can tell, and I've had zero downtime for over 6 months now after starting 15 months ago.
Yet, if I give a straight hourly figure, 90% of the time I'm either told it's too much or I never hear back at all. I do a little better when quoting a fixed price based on the same hourly rate (plus buffers, etc), but many times the work is too ill-defined to come up with a definite offer, so it comes down to giving an hourly rate, with the usual result.
I've had the most success and repeat business with extremely time-sensitive projects, or projects that have gone off the rails and need turning around. I charge about 50% more if I'm basically being asked to work day and night. Once the work is done and done well (and it always is), I can generally get future projects at the standard rate with no major trouble.
I've reluctantly tried the loss-leader strategy of charging less on the first project, and as expected it's not terribly effective.
So as far as I can tell, the issue isn't so much the price as proving I'm worth it. How do you guys handle referrals, references, etc.?
A lot of my work involves NDAs (as it's often subcontracted), which makes referring to existing work and customers extremely difficult. I have a few customers who are brilliant and who I can use as references, but as far as I know, nobody has ever followed them up. Other than literally becoming known by everyone in the area, what other options do I have? Am I expecting a higher conversion rate than I should be? How do I go about finding more well-paying customers?
Maybe I'm tending to the wrong niches, too. My background is mainly in high performance computing, game tech and web apps.
- I've had zero HPC freelance work, and no leads either. No clue where to find them.
- I've had a sizeable amount of game tech programming, but getting reasonable money from game devs seems to be like squeezing blood from a stone.
- The web app business can yield better results, but there's a sea of awful programmers (who seem to exclusively know PHP for whatever reason) out there who call themselves web developers. Their hourly rates are dirt cheap, but their efficiency is lower still. I still can't reliably get this through to potential customers.
- The easiest money is in business-y/enterprise-y development. Except the only way I seem to be able to do this is via subcontracting, which is suboptimal because it's the middle man getting the reputation.
I'm not sure what other areas are more lucrative. Embedded stuff seems like a good fit to my skill set (game console development isn't far off) but I have no clue how to even find potential customers. I'm not sure how or where best to sell myself to enterprise-y businesses.