Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

My current daily rate is £400 / day, I work in London, UK.

I work as a Node.js Developer, I have 5+ years of experience and my main skills are Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Redis, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AngularJS, Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, Linux.

$400/day. Full time remote. (International clients). DevOps work.

Let me give a quick rundown of rates I've heard for contract developers in London. Please add comments if you feel this doesn't reflect the truth or you have additions to make. Do note I'm specifically referring to contract developers in London.

Highest rates are working in finance. For specialised skills one can get around £1000 per day. £700 is more typical. This is in the context of Scala and "big data" developers.

Outside of finance Scala developers typically get £500-600 per day. Ruby seems to be £400-500, with PHP in the region £300-400.

As always, the rarer your skills the more you can charge. Assuming of course your skills are in demand. As a contract developer you're a bit of a commodity anyway. You're a "Ruby developer" or a "Scala developer" and are seen as plug-compatible with other developers in your class. If you want to charge more (or work less) stop being a contract developer. Become the go-to person in a particular niche, by publishing the best content about that niche, and people will seek you out. Then you can charge more. Oh, and you also want to work for people with money. I know from experience working within education is a great way to be poor.

> I believe that services companies and recruiters make a living of hiding this information from the developer community, and often take a 20-25% cut just for sending an email with a CV, a second email to schedule an interview and sending a contract for signature over the post.

Don't mix up hard work and valuable work. If a recruiter approaches you with a client for you and all you have to do is accept the job, that saves you a lot of the hassle of going out and finding a new client. If I sell you a $100 bill for $50, why should you care how much effort it took for me to get that $100 bill?

Another thought: once you get above a certain rate it ceases to make sense to work with staffing agencies. Staffing agencies in my experience usually seem to be willing to pay $30-80/hr, and I'm guessing they probably bill out at about twice what they're paying you. So if they advertise $50/hr as the rate for a particular gig, they're probably billing the client $100/hr, and if your rate is $150, that's a total no-go from the start.

My advice would be to not worry about what anyone else charges. There will always be people who charge more than you and less than you, and it varies wildly. There will always be businesses that will be absolutely shocked by a rate another business would find totally reasonable.

The way I handle my hourly rate is to get a client at $X/hr, and once I've been working at $X/hr for a few months, set a goal to get a new client at $1.5X/hr or $2X/hr by a certain date. Then $2X becomes the new $X and I repeat the process. In this way I've tripled my rate from what it originally was.

I don't share my rate publicly because I don't want a client in 2015 to say, "Well, I saw that you were charging $0.5X in 2014, so why are you asking for $X now?"

But then they should charge a fixed fee, and not charge 25% for the live of the contract just for posting a job on some site, sending a few mails and doing a few phone calls. It's advised to only post rates anonymously to protect against those situations.