How Much Should I Charge: Knowing Your Value
By: I Sun
Tags: Consulting, Freelancing, Web Development, Money

How Much Should I Charge: Knowing Your Value

It’s all about those billable hours

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Getting your freelance or consulting web development business off the ground is tough. I know because I’m going through it firsthand as I start a side web development gig.

How much do websites cost?

This is the $1 million dollar question.

Offer cut-rate prices and you’ll attract bargain hunting customers who are more focused on cost than the value you’re bringing. Set the rates too high and without a portfolio or network to acquire clients and you’re left waiting for the phone to ring.

Searching the internet for the price of a website, you’ll find that cost can vary tremendously based on what the client is looking for and on the experience of the freelancer or web design firm.

Websites can cost between $2,000 to $100,000+

For starter websites with a certain amount of pages, pricing can simply be based on some base price and price per page. What causes the website cost to grow is all the potential aspects and features your potential client may want:

Theming/styling

Database driven or dynamic content

Custom web applications

E-commerce

Mobile/responsive design

How much should I charge?

There’s a couple ways to go about it. Charge a flat rate if you’re confident in meeting the client’s need (e.g. you’ve done a project like this before) and their needs are clearly defined. Baseline your rates by comparing with the competition or by the value you believe it brings (i.e. they’d have to hire someone to put in 100 hours of work to replicate it).

A lot of times though the client won’t know for sure what they want. They like certain things they’ve seen on other sites and “it’d be nice to have this” and “it’d be nice to have that”. Charging by the hour with a ballpark of hours required to complete each feature may be better suited in this case.

Freelancers charge $50–$100 for web design services

When you’re dealing with hourly rates, the client may be more keen on keeping a close eye on progress. This can be alleviated with more frequent communication or demonstrations of minimum valuable product. How much to charge per hour? Well that depends on location and experience but here are some rough numbers.

Source: webfx.com

Understand your bottom line

Like any other business you have to understand your costs.

How much time does it take for you to do different types of tasks?

How much time do you spend doing administrative things like accounting, billing?

Once you have your own internal costs laid down then you can factor in your profit margin on top and use that as a basis for developing your own package rates.

Keeping track of all these costs can be difficult if you don’t have a system in place as you’ll forget all the little things. I started with spreadsheets but after some searching I found this app called Clockify that integrates neatly with sites like GitHub.

Tracking your time

What’s handy about it is how convenient it is. Whenever I pick up an issue to work from GitHub I can click the Start timer button.

Note: This extension is currently only available for Chrome or Firefox because Internet Explorer doesn’t let you have nice things.

Source: Clockify.me site

When you’re done you can click the Stop timer button and it creates a time log entry for you. There’s a couple other ways you can use the time tracker if you’re not working through GitHub as well:

Install the mobile app and click Start/Stop whenever you feel like

Right click in your browser and click Start timer in the context menu

Go to the Clockify site and create time log entries there

Data is Power

Now that keeping track of time is part of your natural workflow you will have a treasure trove of data to evaluate how much time you are spending on your projects.

With the use of tags you could even get more details on where your effort is going (e.g. back end, front end, deployment, customer management). There’s a lot of features in the free version, enough to keep me satisfied for now.

Source: Author

Takeaway