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What to charge to develop a dynamic website

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:00 pm
by paladaxar
After a few years of working with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc...I have been getting requests from people/companies to set up websites for them. I have had companies say "Well, we would pay you whatever it takes to get this set up". But, I have no idea where I should even start with charging people. Is $50 too much? Is $5000 not enough?

What is the going rate for a simple dynamic website these days?

I know I'm not being very specific with the type of website that I would be charging for, I'm just looking for ballpark figures. Are sites charged by number of pages? or hours spent designing them? or what? I have never sold any of my work, so I'm not even sure what questions to ask.

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:11 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Where do you live?
What are the prevailing service rates in your area?
How long will it take?
How much are you worth (to you)?

Answer these (specifically the last question) and you answer your question.

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:11 pm
by onion2k
Moved to Enterprise.

In general I (well, my company) charge what we think the client will happily pay. That basically works out to either around £550/day ($1000/day in the USA) or to £500/month ($950 USA) a month tied into a 3 year Application Service Provider style contract. We work with medium profile clients though, not huge multi-national companies, but not small companies either, sort of in the middle somewhere.

We always charge on a time or project basis, never on a 'number of pages' basis. When you're writing dynamic sites it's pretty common to get tens of thousands of pages in a site, so it's pretty much impossible to work out a per page price.

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:26 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I usually charge by the hour. A good rule of thumb is to decide what you think is reasonable to charge by the hour, and multiply that by 1.5

The reason for the multiplication is all the extra hassle and time that clients always come with. Expect hundreds of emails, possibly several meetings, lots of small changes, nit-picking, "make it webbish, but not too webbish" comments, and design-by-committee hell. Charge accordingly.

Also, who will be hosting the site? Who will be maintaining the site? Get ALL these details discussed and inked in a contract before you begin work. Also plan out a schedule that includes you receiving their information for the initial launch. Many clients will drag their heels and then suddenly deliver, putting pressure on you to be finished right away. A schedule will help keep you and your client working together.

Also, implicit with the schedule and the hourly rate is an estimate - clients almost always add features mid-project. Then you can alter the schedule to reflect the changes, giving your client a better overview of how it will affect the timeline / final cost.

For my rates as an example, PM me.

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:28 pm
by paladaxar
Everah wrote: How much are you worth (to you)?
I dont have a clue what I'm worth. I'm a college student (majoring in Computer Engineering at Penn State), and the jobs I have had include McDonalds, a coputer store, mowing lawns and lifeguarding. I create websites in my free time (during the summer months usually). But, I have a sneaky suspicion that I am worth more than the $6.50/hour they gave me at McDonalds :)

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:38 pm
by Kieran Huggins
So is this to be the start of your career or just a summer gig that beats flipping burgers? Do you have examples of your work?

Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 5:16 pm
by feyd
Survey the For Hire and Job listings in your local papers and websites like Dice and Monster. From that you can often ween the average pay scale for your area. Next example the portfolios of local peers. Examine them in great detail. Is their work comparable? The more similar they are, the more you can charge near their rate. If you want more work you can often lower your price, however some clients judge quality based on price and as such can actually lose clients based on too low of a price.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 11:34 am
by paladaxar
Kieran Huggins wrote:So is this to be the start of your career or just a summer gig that beats flipping burgers? Do you have examples of your work?
Um...pretty much a summer gig. Since I'm studying to be a computer engineer, I'm pretty sure I want to develop hardware once I start working for real.

Right now I program just because its fun, and to solve some of the problems around me.

Here are two examples...

I work as a lifeguard at Penn State, and our system for finding substitutes for shifts that we couldn't work was terrible. I would get at least 5 emails every day from people looking to swap shifts, so, I made a site that allowed any employee to list shifts that they couldn't work, then other employees could log in and take the shifts. No more emails, and everything was completely organized online.

http://www.sublistonline.com

The idea for another one of my sites came to me while I was deployed with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. We were in Kosovo and our deployment was almost over. I knew that we all had a lot of stuff that we had bought while we were over there that we were not going to be bringing back to the states (tv's, carpets, drawer sets, etc). And I knew that the incoming group would need most of these things. So, I created a little "ebay" type site so that we could all list our items and the incoming rotation could buy them, and know that they would have them when they arrived (instead of paying full price for the item brand new, or going from door to door asking if anyone was selling anything...like we had to do when we got there).

http://www.milbuy.com

I have had a few companies (restaurants, etc) ask me to make custom versions of the first site for them. I just don't have a clue where to even start pricing.

Thanks everyone for your input so far...

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 12:37 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Charge what you think a business should pay for something like that. I tend to go between $60 to $120 per hour times the number of hours I think it will take me (times a factor of 1.3 to account for client cruft and feature creep).

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 1:19 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Me too; I work out the cost based my per-hour rate and multiply that by the number of hours I expect it to take. If I estimate badly I sometimes cut myself short.... It's not always easy to anticipate all the hurdles you may hit before you start. If it's a large project I'll break it into sub-projects (milestones) and it's then easier to asses the time for each milestone, and you can charge per-milestone.

If you really can build something that would be suitable for a business to use I wouldn't charge less than $40/hr. I still get shocked when people get turned off when they hear they'll be paying say £40GBP/hr (~$80USD). If a client can't afford something as reasonable as that, perhaps they should reconsider if the project is even going to make any money.

A typical quote from me would state that my prices are based on my rate of XX/hr. Then I'd list the milestones, estimated timeframes and cost for each one. 20% deposit up-front so you don't get messed around by a client who can't make their mind up.

*Reasonable* changes in the spec go unbilled providing the time taken to implement them is *reasonable*. Major changes become billable on a per-hour basis.

Don't ever give a quote based on a really sketchey/outlined spec.... you need a detailed spec because I can guarantee there will be all kinds of bells & whistles to bolt-on which were not mentioned in the brief outline.

Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 1:23 pm
by onion2k
d11wtq wrote:If you really can build something that would be suitable for a business to use I wouldn't charge less than $40/hr. I still get shocked when people get turned off when they hear they'll be paying say £40GBP/hr (~$80USD). If a client can't afford something as reasonable as that, perhaps they should reconsider if the project is even going to make any money.
I find that too. I've had clients wanting a website for their company and expecting to pay £100. It amazes me that they think their company is worth so little that a £100 site would do it justice.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 4:27 am
by Kieran Huggins
That drives me nuts - people who think a website should cost a couple of hundred bucks (even with new graphics!) - If after explaining everything (very diplomatically) they're still idiots, I usually tell them that maybe one of their employees has a teen-aged kid who would make them something in Word and "Save as HTML" or toss up a myspace page.

When they get frustrated with that approach, maybe they'll take our profession more seriously. Those clients aren't usually worth dealing with anyway.

Also: if the words "government", "board" or "committee" come up at any point, triple your estimated cruft-hours immediately. Seriously :(

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 4:38 am
by obiron
also, you need to agree who owns the IP rights on the site. If you are writing software that may useful elsewhere (e.g. order processing) and you want to be able to re-use it then you need the IP. If you want to guarantee that they always use you to update the site then you need to keep hold of the IP. If they want to be able to get someone else in at a later date then there is normally a premium to be paid for giving away the rights to the software. You may need to set up an ESCROW agreement where the source code is held by a third party and your client can get hold of it in the event you are hit by a truck / decide to become a monk etc..

Are you doing the site design as well as the processing or are they going to use a graphics designer / content management system.

If you need to learn pagemaker / quark / flash etc... then these all take time.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 4:46 am
by onion2k
obiron wrote:If you need to learn pagemaker / quark / flash etc... then these all take time.
Time, which, as a client I would not be willing to pay for. It's not fair to charge a client for time you spend learning how to do your job.

If you were paying someone to build a house for you would you be happy to pay them while they learnt plumbing or bricklaying or roofing? Of course not. The same goes for web development. Learn things in your own time, not in the client's time.

Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 5:59 am
by Chris Corbyn
onion2k wrote:
obiron wrote:If you need to learn pagemaker / quark / flash etc... then these all take time.
Time, which, as a client I would not be willing to pay for. It's not fair to charge a client for time you spend learning how to do your job.

If you were paying someone to build a house for you would you be happy to pay them while they learnt plumbing or bricklaying or roofing? Of course not. The same goes for web development. Learn things in your own time, not in the client's time.
Agreed. Although there are times when you're forced to learn some custom language a company wrote to wrap an API around which you would never have had a plausible cause to learn in the past.

EDIT | I can say that >80% of the time these "quick fix" or "modify this existing code" jobs are never as simple as they are made to sound and could potentially drag on for ages when really you could have done it from scratch in less time.