Freelancing hourly rates
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The job is desktop application in .Net, no financial or other expertise required and the client is in Switzerland.
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
Switzerland and no Financial Expertise? :)
------------------------------------ I try to appear cooler, by calling him Euler.
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So with the move from Eastern Europe to the Western side, and with my first freelance project on the horizon it's time to update my hourly rates and I'm curious as to what hourly rates do other freelance CPians use. I want to be fairly cheap for this project and I was thinking at Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap? What's your hourly rate?
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
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Ah, I am not employed as a programmer/developer. I am a company accountant. I am learning c# as I do some developement stuff in house. (Also I am learning so as to NOT be an accountant any more. I want to live in NZ and run a bar and cook. But until that happens, not being an accountant is my next ambition). :)
------------------------------------ I try to appear cooler, by calling him Euler.
Dalek Dave wrote:
I want to live in NZ and run a bar and cook.
Good luck. Sounds fun. :) Sometimes I'd rather do that than what I do. Throw away computer and... become a traveler or something.
Kind regards, Pawel Krakowiak Miraculum Software[^]
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So with the move from Eastern Europe to the Western side, and with my first freelance project on the horizon it's time to update my hourly rates and I'm curious as to what hourly rates do other freelance CPians use. I want to be fairly cheap for this project and I was thinking at Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap? What's your hourly rate?
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
Go for more. You need to be well paid for the pain of doing this on the side and not having a private life while it gets done.
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So with the move from Eastern Europe to the Western side, and with my first freelance project on the horizon it's time to update my hourly rates and I'm curious as to what hourly rates do other freelance CPians use. I want to be fairly cheap for this project and I was thinking at Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap? What's your hourly rate?
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
Mircea Grelus wrote:
Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap?
Way to cheap if you are good at what you do. But, I understand the motivation of wanting to build a strong reputation.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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So with the move from Eastern Europe to the Western side, and with my first freelance project on the horizon it's time to update my hourly rates and I'm curious as to what hourly rates do other freelance CPians use. I want to be fairly cheap for this project and I was thinking at Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap? What's your hourly rate?
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
Mircea Grelus wrote:
What's your hourly rate?
$84 US
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Well it's a part time thing. I'm still keeping my current job, but doing this project aside as a source of extra income. It involves rewriting an existing application they have.
norm .net wrote:
You obviously never contracted then?
Not exactly. I've been involved in a few projects as a freelancer but was not in a direct relation to the client. I was subcontracted by an outsourcing company (in Romania) so you can imagine the rates were pretty low.
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
Mircea Grelus wrote:
Well it's a part time thing. I'm still keeping my current job, but doing this project aside as a source of extra income.
Then it should actually generate extra income. I still have my day job as well, though I no longer have time for overtime at work. The overhead associated by contracting your time should be fully/completely compensated. Your day-job work is selling you at a higher right, giving you a portion in wage, and keeping the rest to compensate for your benefits. Generally you want to start 50% to 100% above your earned income wage from your day-job. Should the other ever increase in time and take over from your day-job, you could find yourself making half the money because you switched to contracting full time, and that would be a shocker! Just because you are keeping your day-job doesn't mean you should sell yourself short!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Mircea Grelus wrote:
So I'm guessing you think it's not that cheap?
Not cheap, Peanuts.
WPF - Imagineers Wanted Follow your nose using DoubleAnimationUsingPath
True. If we quote too less, then some of the stingy fellows might resort to an exploitation spree. At least for freelancing spectrum in India, I could give a good number of examples on this.
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. --Leonard Louis Levinson -
So with the move from Eastern Europe to the Western side, and with my first freelance project on the horizon it's time to update my hourly rates and I'm curious as to what hourly rates do other freelance CPians use. I want to be fairly cheap for this project and I was thinking at Eur 25 /hour. What do you think? Too expensive? Too cheap? What's your hourly rate?
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
The length of the contract is a big factor. The time it takes you to find contracts between contracts needs to be factored in to your hourly rate. I use a spreadsheet and call the length of a contract "risk" that way I know how many weeks on average I will be looking for a contract with contracts of that nature. I then subtract the hours from 2080. Then I subtract paid time off from the remainder. 6 month contracts probably will leave you with a little more than 1600 billable hours for a year. The remainder of your time will be spent with advertising and soliciting work. (And continued education training, conferences are important as well as some vacation). Divide the annual income you want by 1600, let's say you want to make 100k per year USD that would be 62.50 per hour. Now add 7.5% self-employment tax if you are 1099 or Corp-Corp for the Fica difference and you get $67 per hour. Of course now you need benefits, lets just say 15k per annum for Health care, Retirement and a good conference. Add $9.50 per hour. Thats $76.50 per hour. Now the real killer, travel. To make travel numbers more realistic divide its total for a year by 2080 because you will not travel when not working (in theory). If you flew on-site every week and came home you could maybe, maybe do it all in $30k or $14.50 per hour. This leaves your grand total for a 100k salary at $91 per hour. Since the average income for developers in the States is between 70k and 120k no matter where you live I think the consulting industry is grossly underpaid for our filed, at least for independents; considering the vast majority of advertisements are for $55 an hour.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway -
Mircea Grelus wrote:
Well it's a part time thing. I'm still keeping my current job, but doing this project aside as a source of extra income.
Then it should actually generate extra income. I still have my day job as well, though I no longer have time for overtime at work. The overhead associated by contracting your time should be fully/completely compensated. Your day-job work is selling you at a higher right, giving you a portion in wage, and keeping the rest to compensate for your benefits. Generally you want to start 50% to 100% above your earned income wage from your day-job. Should the other ever increase in time and take over from your day-job, you could find yourself making half the money because you switched to contracting full time, and that would be a shocker! Just because you are keeping your day-job doesn't mean you should sell yourself short!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Ah, I am not employed as a programmer/developer. I am a company accountant. I am learning c# as I do some developement stuff in house. (Also I am learning so as to NOT be an accountant any more. I want to live in NZ and run a bar and cook. But until that happens, not being an accountant is my next ambition). :)
------------------------------------ I try to appear cooler, by calling him Euler.
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The length of the contract is a big factor. The time it takes you to find contracts between contracts needs to be factored in to your hourly rate. I use a spreadsheet and call the length of a contract "risk" that way I know how many weeks on average I will be looking for a contract with contracts of that nature. I then subtract the hours from 2080. Then I subtract paid time off from the remainder. 6 month contracts probably will leave you with a little more than 1600 billable hours for a year. The remainder of your time will be spent with advertising and soliciting work. (And continued education training, conferences are important as well as some vacation). Divide the annual income you want by 1600, let's say you want to make 100k per year USD that would be 62.50 per hour. Now add 7.5% self-employment tax if you are 1099 or Corp-Corp for the Fica difference and you get $67 per hour. Of course now you need benefits, lets just say 15k per annum for Health care, Retirement and a good conference. Add $9.50 per hour. Thats $76.50 per hour. Now the real killer, travel. To make travel numbers more realistic divide its total for a year by 2080 because you will not travel when not working (in theory). If you flew on-site every week and came home you could maybe, maybe do it all in $30k or $14.50 per hour. This leaves your grand total for a 100k salary at $91 per hour. Since the average income for developers in the States is between 70k and 120k no matter where you live I think the consulting industry is grossly underpaid for our filed, at least for independents; considering the vast majority of advertisements are for $55 an hour.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest HemingwayThank you for this insightful perspective. I'm not planning on switching completely to contract work for now. I'm going to do it side by side with my fulltime job, but you have some very good points to take into account. Really appreciated!
Cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
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norm .net wrote:
Good point.
on advantage with starting the process at a proposal for SBIRs is there are enough sites on the net to walk you through the process of calculating your wage. Because every person always asks, "what over head value should I use?" the answer is calculate it. Your number is different from mine, and everyone else's. There are no numbers that are right or wrong per se, but there are a list of costs for you to fill in to calculate your own number. If you want paid vacations, then you have to collect the money while working to save to take a week off. These things a day-job-worker takes for granted, and most startup contractors forget. Even I was a bit naieve about a few things, but one reason I listed the max profit value for the company was to make sure that any mistakes I had made came out of that number, not my wages.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The length of the contract is a big factor. The time it takes you to find contracts between contracts needs to be factored in to your hourly rate. I use a spreadsheet and call the length of a contract "risk" that way I know how many weeks on average I will be looking for a contract with contracts of that nature. I then subtract the hours from 2080. Then I subtract paid time off from the remainder. 6 month contracts probably will leave you with a little more than 1600 billable hours for a year. The remainder of your time will be spent with advertising and soliciting work. (And continued education training, conferences are important as well as some vacation). Divide the annual income you want by 1600, let's say you want to make 100k per year USD that would be 62.50 per hour. Now add 7.5% self-employment tax if you are 1099 or Corp-Corp for the Fica difference and you get $67 per hour. Of course now you need benefits, lets just say 15k per annum for Health care, Retirement and a good conference. Add $9.50 per hour. Thats $76.50 per hour. Now the real killer, travel. To make travel numbers more realistic divide its total for a year by 2080 because you will not travel when not working (in theory). If you flew on-site every week and came home you could maybe, maybe do it all in $30k or $14.50 per hour. This leaves your grand total for a 100k salary at $91 per hour. Since the average income for developers in the States is between 70k and 120k no matter where you live I think the consulting industry is grossly underpaid for our filed, at least for independents; considering the vast majority of advertisements are for $55 an hour.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest HemingwayExcellent post.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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The length of the contract is a big factor. The time it takes you to find contracts between contracts needs to be factored in to your hourly rate. I use a spreadsheet and call the length of a contract "risk" that way I know how many weeks on average I will be looking for a contract with contracts of that nature. I then subtract the hours from 2080. Then I subtract paid time off from the remainder. 6 month contracts probably will leave you with a little more than 1600 billable hours for a year. The remainder of your time will be spent with advertising and soliciting work. (And continued education training, conferences are important as well as some vacation). Divide the annual income you want by 1600, let's say you want to make 100k per year USD that would be 62.50 per hour. Now add 7.5% self-employment tax if you are 1099 or Corp-Corp for the Fica difference and you get $67 per hour. Of course now you need benefits, lets just say 15k per annum for Health care, Retirement and a good conference. Add $9.50 per hour. Thats $76.50 per hour. Now the real killer, travel. To make travel numbers more realistic divide its total for a year by 2080 because you will not travel when not working (in theory). If you flew on-site every week and came home you could maybe, maybe do it all in $30k or $14.50 per hour. This leaves your grand total for a 100k salary at $91 per hour. Since the average income for developers in the States is between 70k and 120k no matter where you live I think the consulting industry is grossly underpaid for our filed, at least for independents; considering the vast majority of advertisements are for $55 an hour.
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest HemingwayI think there must be a squeeze, around here at least. I've noticed the rates jumping up over the last year or two around here, in my experience by more then a quater for .net related technologies. Also seems as if HR is dropping out of the hiring process to a degree and leaving more to the tech managers. How's the rest of the country/world?
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me :doh: