Ask HN: How do you charge for a custom WordPress site development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you charge for a custom WordPress site development?

I've recently been undertaking a number of custom WordPress site development projects. Some entail building a theme from scratch including everything the client wants in terms of functionality. While others, include giving a complete facelift to a pre-existing theme.

My question for other WordPress developers out there: how do you determine what to charge for projects you undertake? Hourly? Fixed? Something else?

I've been struggling with how to put a pricetag on my own time and services and look forward to hearing thoughts from the community.

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We did a significant amount of Wordpress work last year and experimented with pricing (we've since stopped taking these projects). I should really write a full blog post on all the details. Just a side note, we are a C/C++, node.js consultancy but have PHP and .NET developers too (we hired a couple of Wordpress people last year for these projects as well).

What we found is that sites below about $4k we didn't even consider, $4-8k gave us the most headaches and we lost the most money on, $8-12k went smoother but were a slightly harder sell, sites above $12k were much easier but required a bit more sales effort. We wound up front loading every Wordpress site with a designer that would do the layout, get client sign-off and collect all assets before handing anything to development. We did this because one of the biggest issues was waiting for sign-off's and waiting for assets etc from clients, but of course now designer hours go up but that is cheaper than developer hours for us and clients.

Basic rule, the more the project price increases the more you can say yes to clients and make them happy and still make a living for yourself, the low dollar stuff you just can't make clients happy, stay sane and make money. I am sure as an individual it would be better up to a point.

One last point, screen clients heavily especially one that compares you to some teenager or person from another country. It isn't that those people may not be good enough, but it is more about what you are worth then whether they are good enough.

I work with wordpress a lot (not as a developer but user) so I am throwing in my 2 cents.

Wordpress is a very competitive domain where you are competing with many developers from all over the world (think elance, odesk etc). So you have to price yourself based on value and not just a number.

For example, if you say that you charge $50/hour, you can never compete with an ok developer from India/Eastern Europe charging 10-15/hour. So forget the hourly stuff.

Talk about the value of what you have done with wordpress. Do you write about it ? What problems did you solve and for what kind of clients ?

My advice: talk about the businesses and their problems you have solved using wordpress. You can always talk about how you used wordpress (customized a theme etc) but for what purpose is the key for clients.

Once you can talk like this, you can also charge based on value which means charge a fixed fee or daily rate etc. For example, lets say a client wants to build a custom plugin that you know you can do in 5 hours, why tell him/her that ? Figure out what value it adds to the client. Then price your work accordingly. Sure this does not always work the same way for all kinds of jobs but it can matter. Editing a theme's css is probably very simple for most wordpress devs but creating a custom plugin for a specific purpose may not be.

I do contract Drupal development, and I charge strictly hourly. Don't do fixed bid. You will always get screwed over, and the risk simply isn't worth it. For reference, I charge $150/hour for Drupal development. Sure, you might lose the customers that compare you to the $10-15 guy in India, but that's exactly the kind of customer you don't want to work with anyway. Good customers expect to pay good money for good work.

I second not doing fixed bid projects. I've been building custom WordPress sites for a local firm who provides me with a design and I charge hourly ($65-$80/hr) to bring those designs to life. This includes building a custom theme, finding and configuring appropriate plugins, writing any code to support custom functionality, and handling the deployment to the hosting provider.

Average project cost tends to be around $4,500. Sites with only a few pages and a single layout can cost as little as $2,500 while sites with more eye-catching client-side stuff like transitions and animation are usually in the $10k range.

Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850335

h/t 'tptacek

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