On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 07:39:02PM -0500, Russell Hires wrote:
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> > Churches ARE businesses. Don't let anyone kid you. Many denominations own
> > more real-estate than GM, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler combined. And no
> > recalls to worry about.
>
> Okay, so it doesn't matter if it's a church. What is a good hourly rate? Do I
> want to charge per unit sold (such as, per page, or per type of thing that is
> done) instead of an hourly rate? I don't have a clue about how an independent
> person works this out.
I worked for a company a few years ago that did customizations to
off-the-shelf accounting software. Prices ranged from $95/hr to $150/hr,
depending on how long the customer had been with us and such. That was
for programming.
The company I own now generally charges $75 for typesetting and $95/hr
for web programming (we do print work and websites). Websites go in
graduated packages, starting at about $250 (single page, stock graphics
and such), up to about $1250, IIRC. Hosting is by the month, domain
registration and renewal is $35 per year. (We had a thread about this
earlier. I don't let customers register their own domains unless they
take full responsibility for the crap that goes with it.)
This is really a question of what the market will bear, and what others
are charging. We recently raised our rates when we found out our printer
was charging a lot more than us for typesetting work. Likewise, charging
by the "unit" and charging by the hour depends on how other people
charge for things, and what type of complications you foresee. For
example, with typesetting, you have to compensation for typographic
corrections, and for customers who decide to dictate whole changed
paragraphs over the phone to you. No way to do it but by the hour. OTOH,
web pages are usually simple and you can charge by the page or the
complexity of the site, given some basic rules. Plus, I think most
companies charge by the site or by the page, not by the hour.
One caution, though: some customers will chew every bit of your time up
jabbering incoherently about what they _think_ they _might_ want.
Normally, you build in a certain amount of "consultation" time. But it
should be made clear that the customer gets X hours of "free"
consultation time. Beyond that, it's your standard (high) hourly
consultation rate. Discourages vacillation and indecisiveness, or at
least compensates you when it happens. As an electrician years ago, I
used to get things all wired (so much per box, etc.), and have the
customer come in and decide they wanted this moved a foot, an outlet
added there, etc. At that point, it's "time and materials."
And if you're just starting out and want to do a lot more of this, you
tend to give your first customers some price breaks, so you have some
history to show other people.
HTH,
Paul
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