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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I was discussing few days ago with someone who "work in IT" a project that he wants to get done. It's a Golf amateurs related website (JS/PHP App). I have told him that everything is simple and ready [can be found somewhere] (user login, querying a database, Image manipulation, user comments...) but the hard thing is putting all the functionalities together and making them really WORK. I estimated 1,500 USD, which I think quite low (pricing myself at around $15-20/hour), but I'm just starting and no kind of professional.

He thought it's quite high and he said he don't think such basic functionalities are quite hard to do. Yes, they are not. But testing, deploying, IE bugs, polishing and fixing are very expensive.

Software development is expensive, Polished Software is frikin' high expensive.

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You need to price yourself higher. While $20 for you may be a lot (as I thought it was during school), for a reputable firm this is nothing, and it means you won't be taken as seriously. This manifests as them often wasting your time in terms of developing features they don't really need. This is probably going to happen in any software project, but a higher per hour cost makes people think about your time in a better light.

Also, get a retainer. Took my 18 months to get money from a friend's company once. Retainers get rid of so much BS.

Mind explaining how the retainer would work?

If you're doing the work for a flat project fee, ask for 20-50% of the fee up front before doing any work. If you're going to be paid hourly, you probably would have provided at least an estimate of hours that the project will take. Your retainer should be 20% of the total of your rate times hours estimated.

Always request a retainer. Especially for new clients. Even more so for friends and family.

I either take 50% upfront or ask for Odesk. (Odesk will guarantee payments for hourly work).

I already figured out that I either get to the top (+$50/hour) from the first time or I stay low balled to $10-15. So right now, I'm improving my skills and building a portfolio.

$1500 is incredibly low for any kind of bespoke development.

Incidentally, at $15-$20 an hour, you're severely under-pricing yourself, if you're in any major market in North America that I can think of.

That depends though, if you are in school and your alternate job is flipping burgers for around the same pay it is more attractive. Sure you could get more but there is a lot more in running proper professional freelancing, if your learning along the way and your client knows that life/ school will get in the way frequently it's a decent deal.

Of course one you get to the stage of having a business with all the proper overheads and spending fixed hours with good programming knowledge it becomes next to nothing pay.

Eh, even as a student, when your price range is putting you on par with lawn-mowing services, you're going to run into a lot of time-wasters and fools who think you ought to do it for a six-pack and the opportunity to wash their car. Hence the aforementioned "guy who wants a custom web application and thinks $1500 isn't a steal of a deal".

Raising your rates will winnow out the chaff and get you doing more serious projects that will look better on your resume.

It could, it could also hit you with people who expect you to drop everything, even if exams are on or assignments are due. Not saying this doesn't happen on the low end to but you can at least say to decent people that your lowering the rates to have more flexibility.

I come across a guy with the same sort of attitude when I first started, occasionally hit up hes website to see if it ever went anywhere after I realized the work was dead end, it didn't.

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