Like someone else said, the agency is Russian. From their "about" page:
https://soshace.com/aboutus
197183, Russia, Saint-Petersburg, Polevaya Sabirovskaya street, 54А, office 335
Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#62fwiw my current billing rate is $300/hr. Full stack. Mostly web. 18+ years of experience. San Francisco. Clients all over the Bay Area.
Working only remotely? afaik face-to-face interaction is highly valued in Bay Area.
I meet the clients f2f a lot at the beginning of the project. Then I'm off to just writing code at home until it's time to deliver the project. It's just the nature of the projects I've taken on. I'm sure there are other kinds of software consulting where you need to meet them everyday, go to their standups and things like that. Fortunately, I've avoided that. I've developed a reputation for "going off and getting it done". That's the brand. So people don't expect constant meetings.
Cheesy title notwithstanding, I found this book to be useful: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/260218.Million_Dollar_Co...
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
What “they say” is 75/hr, salary divided by 1000. I’m guessing you doubly applied the 2x factor.
May I ask how the calculation works? For $75/hr (to take California as an example) you have ~$105k after tax; subtract ~$5k for insurance and you're left with $100k. Whereas for $75k/year you're left with $56k/year after tax. Meaning that when you're on salary, you're pocketing 56% of the money you would as a freelancer. The only way I can make sense of this is if it's freelancers expect to bill around 25h/week... is…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What “they say” is 75/hr, salary divided by 1000. I’m guessing you doubly applied the 2x factor.
May I ask how the calculation works? For $75/hr (to take California as an example) you have ~$105k after tax; subtract ~$5k for insurance and you're left with $100k. Whereas for $75k/year you're left with $56k/year after tax. Meaning that when you're on salary, you're pocketing 56% of the money you would as a freelancer. The only way I can make sense of this is if it's freelancers expect to bill around 25h/week... is…
Medical insurance is more like $1,600+/month for a married couple, even more if you have kids. That's ~$20k/year which brings you down to $85k after tax.
And did you factor-in having to pay both halves of Social Security and Medicare? I believe that's another 15.3% [0]
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/se...
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
150/hr sums up to 200k/year if you work 30 hours a week for 11 months. ----- Fixed typo
Assuming you meant 150/hr... Freelancers have costs that W2 employees do not, like self employment taxes and the full cost of health insurance.
They also have benefits that W2 employees do not, like deducting expenses, $50k+ in allowable retirement contributions per year, and the 20% QBI deduction.
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#66When I started freelancing, I did extremely cheap jobs because I didn't have experience and didn't know better. I did what you are currently doing, I went online to find answers. And the answer is, there are no fixed rate. The rate you are seeing, is perfectly reasonable for someone who charges this rate. At some point, my fee was $40 an hour. I freelanced through a 3rd party who found gigs for me, and took their cut…
Excellent post. Thanks for sharing. As a rookie software engineer, this is very interesting for me to read as I myself want to eventually transition to freelance work.
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#67You will not find a standard range of freelancer rates, just as you won't find a standard range of developer salaries in the United States. The $20-30/hr job listing you shared will not attract any experienced Python developers. Experienced Python developers can easily secure jobs with $100K+/year salaries and benefits in any medium sized city. That job listing is searching for entry-level Python engineers who don't…
Almost all of the contractors that I've worked with have used recruiters to help them find most of their B2C contracts.
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
What “they say” is 75/hr, salary divided by 1000. I’m guessing you doubly applied the 2x factor.
May I ask how the calculation works? For $75/hr (to take California as an example) you have ~$105k after tax; subtract ~$5k for insurance and you're left with $100k. Whereas for $75k/year you're left with $56k/year after tax. Meaning that when you're on salary, you're pocketing 56% of the money you would as a freelancer. The only way I can make sense of this is if it's freelancers expect to bill around 25h/week... is…
Your assuming that the freelancer is billing out 2000/year. That's not usual. Some freelancers can, but many cannot. The risk of long periods of downtime are bundled into that rate. Other expenses can be legal, own equipment, development, training, own office, etc. It depends on the freelancer's situation; you might wind up putting a lot of money back into the business. In that case, $75/hour is not really very much in the US.
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who pays >150? I always hear about this but neither as freelancer or as employee who hires freelancers I have ever seen somebody making that much as freelancer. Sometimes consulting companies charge that much but the freelancers probably get paid only a fraction of that.
when I get my own clients directly, and I'm closer to that. When I'm subcontracted through someone else, it's typically < $100 ($70-$90). I consciously make that trade off sometimes because I'm effectively outsourcing some of the risk - negotiations, collections, etc. And it's sometimes got me in to projects on teams whereas I'd normally be an independent, and the dynamics and range of engagements I've had has been a…
These numbers are more in line with what I have been and am still seeing.
Re: Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tl;dr: I charge a fair amount (effectively well into $three digits/hr) and making what I have previously at a w2 is a real fight. Presuming you meant $150/hr: indeed, and if you’re freelancing, you almost certainly don’t have that high a proportion of billable time. Prospecting, marketing, deliberate learning, and other overhead are all necessary parts of the deal and can easily take half your available time. I tend…
I'm wondering if it's also not heavily dependent on the business structure that you set up for yourself, as a freelancer. It's a one-man company (for the most successful), a self-employed job (for the majority, or so I hear). The former eventually makes "products", while the latter may entertain a permanent rat race, wheel spin. Difference in point: how much of what you do leads to higher value at fixed cost (notably…
I'm constitutionally incapable of not commenting on threads like this :)
So, yes, your description is accurate, though putting scare-quotes around "products" is necessary here. As folks grow in this profession, as I see it, there's three paths to success without ending up back in a W2:
* make _actual_ products (which is my own eventual goal), or
* find a way to productize their service (re-usable code blocks or processes, customized per client at a very high effective rate), or
* get really good at prospecting new contracts and end up hiring more individual contributors, eventually building an agency.
Of course, you could potentially mix and match, and service productiziation is a good step on the way to building products.
What's most in-common across those three options is that none of them reward you, the freelancer with aspirations towards growth, for billing by the hour. And I think that plays directly into your point of task vs. process: for a _task_ you'll need to consider _how long it will take, while for a _process_ your primary concern is _what it will achieve_.
So all this discussion of hourly rates is actually presupposing an arrangement that runs counter to the best interests of everyone involved--including, frankly, those of your client, because it incentivizes you to take as long as possible to deliver your work product. IMHO once you've crossed the line of "I am making enough money to not think about money when buying a non-special meal", it's time to think about your billing structure, even if you end up losing money short-term. Otherwise you really are signing up to use a very high-value skillset to live paycheck-to-paycheck.
(My prior description of my hourly rate is hand-wavey for two reasons: first, this, that I tend not to charge hourly--and second, that no freelancer in the process of frequently hitting their rates with a multiplier benefits from making a hard rate commitment in public.)
Another comment in this discussion described freelance senior software engineer rates as running $100-300/hr. I believe that, and higher--on an _effective_ basis. But I'd wager the higher end of that scale is day-, week-, or fixed-bid rates.
On a personal note: a lot of the struggle/low utilization on my end owes to having a baby in the home. A W2 keeps paying you the same when you don't sleep for six months, but that has real consequences when you have to find your own customers!