Freelance work - help with pricing

sp4ceman said:
dude, 250 per hour for someone in honours who has no clue wtf they're actually doing is retarded.
your time is not worth 250 an hour, and if you think it is, you're in for a ****ty time when you go job hunting.

what i would be more concerned about is making sure exactly what the terms of your agreement are.
you're freelance now, and you're taking on a project.
if you find a job in a years time, and the project is done and delivered and they want updates, are you available to them?

do some analysis, break it down into a set of clearly defined deliverables and make sure you all agree on what "done" means BEFORE you write a single line. make sure you define who the source belongs to, who any interesting idea's based on the project belong to, and make sure your ass is covered.

nothing worse than trying to get rid of some dude you helped out six months ago.

and fix your pricing ffs.
look at how much people with your experience are making in the actual job world, where they're in an environment dedicated to training them up. realise you'll be muddling around on your own using google and stackoverflow as your only source of reference and so you'll prolly take a really long time to do things that wouldn't take most experienced dev's that long to do. if a starting salary for an honours student is around 12-15k per month and you're charging 20k per month, then to quote k's choice... somethings wrong
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Thanks for the advice. This is still only the beginning phase of the negotiations for the job so I will take note of this and bring those things up. In terms of the inexperience bit, see my previous post.

Also, you said I can only get a job for "12-15k per month", the alternative to doing the freelance work would have been a holiday internship for around 25-30k per month (before tax ofc). Personally, I would have preferred that, but I left it a bit too late to organize an internship.

Btw, how would employers measure the amount of time a freelancer spent working? Or is it completely a trust thing?
 
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Nicko said:
Thanks for the advice. This is still only the beginning phase of the negotiations for the job so I will take note of this and bring those things up. In terms of the inexperience bit, see my previous post.

Also, you said I can only get a job for "12-15k per month", the alternative to doing the freelance work would have been a holiday internship for around 25-30k per month (before tax ofc). Personally, I would have preferred that, but I left it a bit too late to organize an internship.

Btw, how would employers measure the amount of time a freelancer spent working? Or is it completely a trust thing?
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Its been my experience that they will want complete time sheets. I have done jobs with and without time sheets, so in the end it boils down the particular client.
 
xrapidx said:
I'm starting to see where all the low figures on the MyBroadband salary surveys come from... Some people really don't think much value of their time.
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This is true, if you have a skill you can charge what you feel according.

In your case I would charge R100ph (seems reasonable and if they like it they will use you more in future.
 
Nicko;10346010Btw said:
They could ask for a portfolio, or a list of jobs or maybe ask what your average "salary" worked out as, or maybe the amount of time you had logged.
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You can't really compare what an employer would pay an employee vs a client paying a freelancer. An employer will pay , because they are making an investment, and hope to improve the employees skills and "rent" them out for more than they pay. A client is paying a freelancer for a service of an equivalent value
 
Cool starting to get an idea how this process will work, but it is a small startup company of like 3-4 people and all they do is make apps so hopefully it won't be too rigorous in their time keeping requirements.

koeksGHT said:
This is true, if you have a skill you can charge what you feel according.

In your case I would charge R100ph (seems reasonable and if they like it they will use you more in future.
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I don't think I will be willing to go as low as that. I must say Its very interesting to see the varying rates that people are suggesting, from as low as R100 to R250.

_kabal_ said:
You can't really compare what an employer would pay an employee vs a client paying a freelancer. An employer will pay , because they are making an investment, and hope to improve the employees skills and "rent" them out for more than they pay. A client is paying a freelancer for a service of an equivalent value
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Yeah completely agree. But sp4ceman was quoting an average pay far less than the reality of the matter. Also, the 25k that I mentioned were from holiday internships which investment plays a smaller part in.

EDIT: Btw for everyone who is raging, I decided to drop it to $20 (R182) ph, because after working out a months worth of work R36 000 did seem a bit steep. This now works out to about R30 000.
 
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semaphore said:
It really depends project to project, my last project was about 100 hours work of work that i actually logged so they most likely scored some extra.

@abzo - Thanks for the compliment. Takes longer than 17 minutes thou.
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Hectic, who do you work for if I may ask? or are you a freelancer?
 
I charged 120 fixing networks in w
1997. Won't make coffee for 135 now.
 
I have to agree with xrapidx. I wouldnt make coffee for 135 either.
 
I personally would make coffee for R135....

Lets give a conservative time for making coffee of 10 minutes. So this equates to R810ph if you charge R135. If you were an efficient coffee maker, you could probably do that in 5 minutes, and that would mean R1620ph, which I think is a pretty decent sum. Ends up being an income of R3.1 million a year, which I suppose you possibly earn more than that but it is definitely not a sum to snub. However, if you were really innovative you could reduce the production time even further, and become the next Bill Gates.
 
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