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I've been working all the time for clients but they all have low budgets and are cheap. How can I break into the $100-$150 per hour Django market?
As you get more gigs, and more referrals, you raise your rate with each gig, even if it's $5/hour. Over the course of 20 gigs, you may well be in the $100-$150 hour range, and have a collection of happy clients willing to do the selling for you.
There are others with possibly more completed projects, clients, time under their belt with more developers, if they are a company, what value do you offer that they cannot provide for less?
Go for bigger clients with bigger budgets, government projects would be a good place to start. Just make sure you have your business setup correctly along with a website, list of services and value you are providing using Django and that you meet a companies prerequisites (Incorporated, LLC, insured, mailing address, phone number, business bank account, etc.).
Ask yourself what value can you bring to the company that will make them want to pay you the higher rate. Once you answer that question and can back it up you will get the rates you are looking for.
what is your hourly pay at the moment? and how did you become a Django ninja? want to follow the same route lol
They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this.
It's not as easy a road as I thought it would be. My flat rate projects always ended up taking longer because of client demands and so my hourly actual pay went way down.
I got good with Django by building things and doing a lot of googling whenever I ran into problems or needed to do something new.
I had a basic computer programming background before this though.
what is your hourly pay at the moment? and how did you become a Django ninja? want to follow the same route lol
Just recently I have put a hard floor at $50 per hour, but its hard to get people to accept $50 per hour when I can't give an exact time frame for all of their wants to be met. They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this. It's not as easy a road as I thought it would be. My flat rate projects always ended up taking longer because of client demands and so my hour…
Honestly if you're doing contracting then having a well defined contract should make this irrelevant. The burden of figuring out how long is on you, not them.
what is your hourly pay at the moment? and how did you become a Django ninja? want to follow the same route lol
Just recently I have put a hard floor at $50 per hour, but its hard to get people to accept $50 per hour when I can't give an exact time frame for all of their wants to be met. They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this. It's not as easy a road as I thought it would be. My flat rate projects always ended up taking longer because of client demands and so my hour…
When you must estimate a timeframe, make a honest estimate, and multiply it by 4.
what is your hourly pay at the moment? and how did you become a Django ninja? want to follow the same route lol
Just recently I have put a hard floor at $50 per hour, but its hard to get people to accept $50 per hour when I can't give an exact time frame for all of their wants to be met. They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this. It's not as easy a road as I thought it would be. My flat rate projects always ended up taking longer because of client demands and so my hour…
I'm just a network security guy with aspirations of becoming a developer some day, but from my observation that seems to be the accepted theory with freelancers on HN.