Hello, Well- this is a pretty simple question but I'm not sure if I'm low balling myself but I do freelance work part-time as a php developer and I'm charging $25/hr. Is this a fair rate or am I missing out on more money. How much do you guys charge?
OK-- I just recently took a php 5 exam and scored in the 80's. I'm an American who's living abroad. ( I work online )
Thanks but- to the people who posted in this thread. Are you developers? I'm asking you freelancers.. I mean, I look at this: http://www.digitalpoint.com/services/pricing.html#seminars and I feel ashamed. Are people really paying this high price?
Normally I charge $150/hr for small or one-off jobs. Higher in the case of certain annoying factors (e.g., deploying on Windows), and down as low as $100 if it's steady long-term work for clients I like. It really depends on your market, how hard you are willing to work on networking and client acquisition, your reputation, and so on. There's no one magic number.
Yes $25/hour is an average php programmer pay. But if you gain more experience,then you can get paid around $50/hour and its depend on the complexity of the task.
@swiftnomad I've found myself in a similar situation recently. I was recently laid off from the ad agency I had worked at. I knew I was billed @ $150.00/hour to clients. Howver for freelance work I've inquired about, people start to scoff if I i tell them I charge even as low as $50/hour. My best guess would be that given the economy, most potential clients don't want to pay "that much" per hour.
I would say it depends on how much you can get done per hour. If you're not overly skilled and work at a slow pace, you won't retain many clients by charging $100 per hour. But if you're experienced and can handle either expert-level jobs, or a large volume of work per hour, then there's no reason to be stuck at 25 bucks.
Hourly rates are misleading for a lot of professions. In an ideal economy, each job has a value. Your hourly rate is determined by how quickly you can deliver. That is why I do not like hiring people based on an hourly wage. I prefer to set a value on a project, and let their skills level determine their individual hourly rate for them.
our developers charge between £15 to £30 per hour depending on skill level. However at the end of the day it all depends on what budget the client has to work with and the complexity of the system some jobs just can't warrant a £30 an hour charge.
Damn.. I get mine indian guys to do programming stuff for $1.5/hour... Where can I find some clients what needs work?
>>Where can I find some clients what needs work? In many ways, this is where the money is. Finding clients, understanding their needs, and translating that into something developers can knock together is not only a time intensive task, but one requiring special skills and talents.
Exactly. Anyone can learn PHP or whatever. If you can't communicate properly, then you are stuck at $1.50 an hour like those mentioned above. They won't pay $50 to you directly, but would pay $150 to your agency because buying from an agency provides built in assurances that freelancers can't match.
Yeah, in my opinion, i think charging by the hour is really subjective. It really depends on how good you are. During college, I've got a friend who could do up a functional site in 3 hours when everyone else is taking a week. It wouldn't be fair to pay him and the rest $25 an hour. So I guess charging fairly depends greatly on how much you can deliver. Perhaps it would be good if you gave a portfolio of sites, and describe how long you took for each project. This would give potential clients a better idea, if you're gonna charge by the hour.
It depends of region very much, for example I change $15 per hour for all my customers. From one hand my office programmers located in Russia and it is hard to find job in USA or Europe if you are in Russia, but from other hand here I have 5 developers with special mathematic education and wide list of done projects like sermon.net and many other. Sometimes we spends hours and hours to find new customer though elance.com
25/hr is cheap for PHP programming. If you're only doing simple plugins for Wordpress or something like that then it's a good price, but if you're building entire applications you can easily charge $45/hr or more, if you have the skills to back it up