Thanks for all of the comments.
feyd wrote:To charge that much or more, a person needs to have very fast response times and/or provide many more services than just programming.
In other words, one should be able to provide all of the services the client will need for their website, such as the backend, the design itself, graphics work, hosting, and purchasing of the domain name? Are there any services I left out in my list that should be mentioned?
d11wtq wrote:Freelancing can be very stressful if your expect to maintain 40 hrs per week consistently for a full year, there's just too many other freelancers out there taking the work too. Finding work, consitently isn't easy. I gave up on the idea of freelancing and started working for a company since it's just more secure [snip].
I thought that 40 hours per week would be a bit much, but I thought that 20 billable hours would be reasonable. Especially after reading
this post by Jcart.
May I ask if you were bidding for work on freelancing sites, sent out proposals to local businesses, or both? I've tried getting work on freelancing sites, and I'd agree with you that asking for 20 hours/week at $80/hour of work from those might be stretching it... or plain ridiculous, in some cases.
Everah wrote:As a private or independent developer you can charge whatever you want per hour. More realistically an independent developer will have better luck charging by the job or project if he/she knows their skill level and ability to meet the clients need. I rarely use an hourly rate in my quotes unless the job is a matter of a few hours.
True, but wouldn't you use what you want/need your hourly rate to be to determine the overall cost of the project?
Everah wrote:Not bad, but nowhere near what full scale .NET developers are being listed for ($75K to $125K).
Whoa - time to learn .NET. Dad bought me Visual C# .net, actually, but I am a PHP addict, and haven't looked at it.
Thanks again, guys.
- Nathaniel