Pricing is an extremely interesting topic and no one's figured it out completely. But as you get more experienced you'll learn patterns regarding what works well and what doesn't. That's the whole point with running a business.
Based on what I've been doing over the last few years -
When you just get into development, calculate the development of the website at ±R300 /hr (which is still far undercharging).
Based on your experience and the scope, you can estimate the time you think it's gonna take you.
Eg,
Client wants a One Page Landing page for his french restaurant.
He didn't mention a specific budget, but asks you to keep the costs to a minimum.
He doesn't have a design from a designer, but sent you some examples what he has in mind.
He wants to be able to make small changes himself, perhaps copywriting etc, so you suggest WordPress as opposed to a static site built with Gatsby or Jekyll.
Your approach:
Usually you will develop the WordPress template from scratch using something like
Underscores.
But since the clients assumable budget doesn't allow for a 100% custom development of a template, you will buy a premium theme for $40 and customise it with a child theme to meet his branding requirements.
So taking all that into account, your estimation is 20 hours development including deploying it on his VPS.
But then you have to remember, 99% of the time clients will ask you to change stuff or add things mid-development. To combat this, we multiply an extra [x 1.3] on top of the anticipated development hours.
So essentially you will be quoting for ~26 hours.
You may ask, why buy a $40 for your client template if I'm a developer?
If your client's got a (much) bigger budget, you probably can code it yourself from scratch, but essentially you're trying to lower his budget by reducing your development time. A custom developed wordpress site (no template) is rarely under 60 hours)
Since he will probably not be getting too much traffic, you can get him on a premium shared hosting cpanel vibe, however for serious website - always go for a VPS Friends don't let friends use shared hosting.
As your portfolio increases, increase your rates. Try doubling your hourly rate after x amount of months.
You will find that clients who pay more are higher quality customers.
The primary reason is that clients who are willing to spend more in their project, are of higher quality.
They are more invested in their project, more interested in working with you and learning about what they are getting into. Higher pricing also allows you as a developer to spend more time perfecting a specific clients website, knowing that you won't lose out on revenue, as opposed to try doing 4 websites in a week for much less.
Additionally I find lower quality customers to lose interest over time, communicate badly and then expect the world - 99% of the time you will lose more. As you gain more experience, you will learn how to handle this, when to accept projects and when to decline when you think there's red flags.
