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Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

Basically yeah, so you might charge 100/hour, and the client will get 40 hours @ 4,000 -- but your expectation is to put in 25-30 in dev work, 10 hours is spent in planning, meetings, consulting, give or take.

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So the downside now is you have to be available for the whole week, which means you can't commit to other clients that week and you can't take time off? And you've got similar disadvantages with hourly billing where if you get through the work faster you'll have less work to charge for later and there's a cap on how much you can earn because there's only so many hours in the week?

Not saying other approaches are perfect but I'm trying to understand alternatives.

Sure, If you make it your own policy to work on one client at a time, you could have downtime that you still charge for. It doesn’t have to be this way though, retainer does not mean you have to be limited to one client. If you feel guilty that you don’t provide enough value for the work you do, go ahead and charge a half daily or a daily rate, and work on other projects on other days. Personally I will take on 1-2 clients max because that is all I can handle at a time without outsourcing parts of my process (have yet to try this). Essentially you can end up with 2 higher paying “jobs” and charge twice or 3 times what your colleagues are making in-house. It all depends on how you want to do things - you’re the boss.

not necessarily -- client pays for 1 week of your time, you could set that week to this week or next, perhaps you're finishing a week for client A, and then going to work 1 week for client B. -- the benefit is you also save a lot of time (and mind fuckery) having to make detailed hourly estimates that almost never are that accurate, it's much easier to estimate a week's worth of time than it is 5-10 hours worth and be super accurate. Also bigger clients don't really throw up much fuss one way or the other, they just want good developers/freelancers.

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