What’s the going rate (I’m in the Atlanta area) for contract web development? I’d like to get a range.
As a software developer who’s been a corporate hack his entire professional career, I have no idea what to charge people who repeatedly ask my help in developing web sites.
I recently spent between 10 and 15 hours helping/teaching a friend how to build and update a simple non-interactive display site. I built it using FrontPage on his free web space so that it would be easier for him to maintain on his own. Yeah, I know, someone’s going to say it’s an abomination for a software developer to use FrontPage. It was the best tool for him, OK?
I’ve recently been asked to help build a more interactive site for my NCAA officiating group.
I’ve always used a 30/40/30 ratio when estimating sofware projects. (30% - requirements, 40% - development, 30% - testing and implementation)
I recently talked to a friend of mine here in Atlanta that owns her own developement shop. She said for side projects, now that the economy is shit, she charges between $40 - $50/hour.
Shit, here I go again. DrMatrix, manhattan, bibliophage, I realize I’m polling, but on the other hand, I’m asking for factual information. If you must move this thread, please do so with my apologies.
Depends on what you do. Straight HTML is worth almost nothing. If you throw in JavaScript, you’re getting warmer. If you use mySQL+PHP, say, then you are getting somewhere.
That’s our usual rate but we usually bring down the total # of hours spent if we know a customer isn’t made of $$. Fortune 500 companies pay top rate.
Also 99% of our sites are built with ASP or ASP.net (SQL or Access db connection) and have a “backend” so we don’t have to do content updates, so all customers “save” over time by not having to pay us again, so that’s why we can charge so much.
We’ve been doing this for a year (small company, 3 people) and so far no one has run away from our rates.
It helps that we can bust out this stuff in a short amount of time, and not dilly-dally to rack up hours. And we’re usually pretty conservative about hours spent - if we scoped 10 hours and it really took 30, we’ll eat the time and call it 15 or 20.
My advice is don’t do sites for set prices (as opposed to hourly), especially if you have to learn something new. You’ll end up making $2 an hour
There is a related thread here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=141607
where I spout off about how this kind of cost survey is too broad to be meaningful. That said, ZipperJJ’s numbers are typical of many mid-industry development companies I know (with the exception of his rate for changes to existing sites, which may go to double or triple the programming rate depending on the current state of the existing site. That is, it costs you a lot more to have me fix your crap than to have me do it right from scratch).
There are definitely people charging more and less, usually with commensurate deliverables.
Why not look in the phone book, call some people who do this & ask for an estimate on something like what you have to do? Then you know what things are going for.
I remember one time talking about salaries in the HTML newsgroup & the guys said we couldn’t do it because it would violate some sort of law & I never figured that out.
