Earlier quoted context omitted.
sweet fancy moses!
Thing is, I wonder where I spent the money.
ah, steak and strippers :)
Ask HN: How much?
61–70 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that low? once again, I must whip out some statistics: 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.
don't forget payroll tax, supplied laptop/desk/electricity/etc, sick leave, annual leave, any skills development, the fact that you're also doing sales (which is probably more than 70K).. Just because you have 70,000 listed on your annual pay summary - does not in any way mean that's how much your company spends to keep you employed. When you are a freelancer - you take on a lot of those costs yourself.
You're making the same mistake made upthread; price by value, not by cost. Payroll costs, leave, utilities, all irrelevant.
Freelancers make more because they accept risk. Customers pay extra to mitigate scheduling risk, recruiting risk, and project risk.
(Yes, you're not viable if you can't at least pay freelancer overhead and still have a living wage, but that has nothing to do with what your bill rate is.)
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#63damn I need to charge my clients more.
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
550/day is not crazy high at all.
When I heard it was in pounds I'll admit to a brief flash of envy. (Though $550 a day would still be, erm, rather substantially more than Japanese salarymen my age get.)
$68/hour is less than my mechanic charges. It's not a bad living, but for a feast-or-famine consultant supporting a family as a sole breadwinner, assuming 70% utilization, it's a gross 95k salary, from which you subtract self-employment tax.
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most freelancers who can solo a multi-month .NET or RoR application make more than 75/hr.
how much per hour would you say that it's worth?
You got downmodded for complaining about being downmodded. The anchor price for generic (solo, incl. project management and interaction design, but excluding graphic design) web dev is ~$120/hr, but Rails and Django people are hard to find right now.
iPhone rates seem to top out at around $200/hr, and iPhone devs "feel" like the hardest consultants to hire right now, so there's your range.
Note that these rates bear no resemblence at all to what a big firm would get. There are all sorts of other risks big firms mitigate that you can't. [%]
[%] (to wit: the risk of negotiating with your brain fully engaged)
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#66Here's a useful outside perspective:
http://www.cartalk.com/content/columns/Archive/1999/October/...
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#67Boy am I in the wrong business if these kids can knock out CRUD apps for $100K.
Well, Laurent charged only $ 500 USD for his solution (but that's an anomaly).
If you are serious about web apps, then scaling the back end comes into play, which means getting into distributed systems. Networking, security and SysAdmin become relevant as well.
I think it's fair to charge up to $100K with a college education and/or work experience in the field. Other professions do so as well.
Go pick on other professions: i.e. banker bonuses, real estate commissions, union rates, lawyer rates etc.
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#68Somehow I feel that this post was more about being boastful than anything else.
Actually, no. But I can see why you would think that. I literally don't know the range of what is reasonable and what is not. Your comment is implicitly informative, though. Furthermore, if I was being boastful, I would probably not be hiding behind an anonymous account.
Boasting usually isn't done to make other people feel bad; it's to make the boaster feel good. This post could serve that purpose even anonymously. If people confirm that you indeed are being highly compensated, that could make you feel good about yourself.
Not that I think that was the intention.
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#69Not sure why you consider this such a touchy subject that you had to do it anonymously. Charging money for your services and skills is not a bad thing.
I've rarely done software development contracting, but I spent several years as an IT contractor (with a lot of scripting, and simple web-based UI work to make it possible for non-technical people to carry on when I've gone). I started at $95/hour, and by the end was quoting $150/hour with a four hour minimum for off-site work, and eight hour minimum plus expenses for on-site work (with a $1000/day discount rate for multiple days).
Most of my development work over the years has been product-focused, wherein no one client paid for the whole thing. I would build as generally as possible, retain ownership, and sell the result to many customers. I wasn't very good at this for the first five years or so, however, and ended up doing a lot of development for pennies on the dollar. I would talk to a potential customer, they'd say, "We wish your products could do X and Y." and I'd think, "Yeah, I bet a lot of people would like that", and would offer to provide it for some ridiculously low price ($199, or whatever) as a plugin for my existing product line...spend two or three weeks working on it (and sometimes money for icons, design, other developers, etc.) and then never sell another copy of that plugin. I suggest not doing that.
Re: Ask HN: How much?
#70assuming 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.
Where do you live? It seems bold to declare it arbitrarily "low" without including location. If you lived in a small town, or Bangalore...