What Do You Charge?

D

designcop

Guppy
Finishing college and starting my web design business, launching in two months. I just got hosting here, and I have analyzed the market fairly well but theres one piece of info that I cannot find reliable data on. WHAT DO WEB DESIGN FIRMS CHARGE! I see so much crappy work out there, so much second rate design but these people say that charge so much on their sites, but what do PEOPLE REALLY PAY? I ask people what they charge and all they can say is ... "it depends ..."

Three customers I am looking into finalizing contracts with, WHAT DO YOU CHARGE? WHAT WOULD YOU CHARGE? ( Range is ok ...)

Real estate agent (single person not office). flash site 100%, beautiful work. ten sections. what do you charge?

restaurant. one mailing list template, website with about 15 sections, menu formated etc. what do you charge?

small company wants shopping cart, ssl setup. they sell candles in a small town. you create asp backend, db's etc etc .. WHAT DO YOU CHARGE?

all of these examples do not include updates.

THANKS ALOT FOLKS!
 
First of all, congratulations on finishing up college!

Second of all, welcome to the community!

Third, a comment about charges -
Not everyone charges the same. There are a lot of factors that you have to bring in to play when it comes to deciding on a rate structure. Can you exist on hourly, or on bid only work... what about retainers and follow-ups? The response, "it depends" is very true.

Here are the factors that *I* brought into play when I was figuring my hourly rate:
- Is what I do a "common" skill?
- Do I offer more than just my basic services?
- Am I willing to accept, "that's just too much" as well as, "there's got to be more to it than that" statements?
- What is my base cost of living (how much does it cost me per month to pay all my bills, feed my family, etc)?
- What kind of relationship do I want to build with my clients to generate repeat business?

Normally professionals won't tell you what they charge unless you're a prospective client. That's because (especially face to face) they're worried that you might take their rate and use it against them when bidding on the same project. In this case I'm not really woried about competition. I charge a standard rate of $45/hr for my work... it's high enough for me to cover my cost of living (Western New York, except for gas, is an inexpensive place to live) and yet it's low enough to be competitive with other CF contractors. I also have a policy of providing free quotes and initial consulting is done at no charge. By offering more for less I have made all of my clients happy people that come back to me when they need something. Then again I've had sales and project breakdown experience so when I look at something as simple as "build me a shopping cart" I instantly ask more quesitons. Those questions tend to lead to either a more robust product (and happier client) or a multiple-phase project that will provide me with more work and the client with a bid that falls in better on a monthly or quarterly budget.

One last thing - rates do not have to be fixed. I actually charge 1/3 my normal rate for religous and non-profit organizations. I even voluteer my services to a couple of groups that I'm involved with. Anything to get my name out there and my skills recognized so I can bring in more clients.

Hope this helps.
 
very true....
as much as we hate the answer "it depends", as Hatton said, its the only (quick) answer.

one other consideration that i can add to the above, is:
"what is my time worth?"

as a beginner, your time will be cheaper, because of your possible lack of experience. as you progress, your time becomes more valueable, becayse you can do more with it.

also. there might be things that are more difficult for you, so it takes longer, so for those things you can charge more. Example: i charge more for graphics per hour, than coding and regular design and updating. why? because there's LOADS of work that goes into graphics, often you have to redo things, or come up with 3 options for a project etc... so you must ensure that its worth your while.

all for now.
good luck!
Sn
 
I base my work on the time it would take..

1 week, $750 to $1000
2 weeks, $2000
4 weeks, $4000

1 week would mean about 20 to 25 hours for me on project so that would match what Hatton charges. I unsually am able to accomodate 2 projects in a week.. I have a good business base though which I built after being a freelancer for over 6 years..

I do recommend a JodoHost reseller package to accompany your web designing business. Has made me more professional to my clients and I do offer free hosting to all my clients for a limited time
 
Ron said:
I do recommend a JodoHost reseller package to accompany your web designing business. Has made me more professional to my clients and I do offer free hosting to all my clients for a limited time
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Alot of big hosting companies started out as web designing companies or individual web developers :)
 
this is something i certainly struggled with when i first started out. i'm probably a little more (but not much more) expensive than those that have contributed here, but I would say that there are many people who charge a great deal more..

I recently built a website for a company and charged about $5000 for it, I gave them many improvements over what they had - but get this - their original website was much more expensive! They had paid $75,000 just last year to a bunch of morons that weren't prepared to give follow up service.

I often will not charge by the hour unless you are talking about updates. I'm not sure I could afford to live on my regular hourly rate. My thinking is that the website is more valuable than the sum of the hours spent building it. Most of my clients are local, and my prices seem to have fit in well with most, especially since I offer good after sales service.
 
LegalAlien said:
My thinking is that the website is more valuable than the sum of the hours spent building it.
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I absolutely agree with this concept.

I also agree with the idea that pricing is a pain. I have a very hard time with this issue and can only share some general thoughts that might help you in formulating your pricing structure.

In my opinion, pricing your work should be done using the same principles you would use to manage a project. That is, do your best to think of every element of work that needs to be done, assign reasonable time estimates to each task, and see how it all adds up.

What I'm driving at here is that a simple, 1 page, static (html only), web presence with no graphics sounds like a project that might be done in as little as an hour -- should be dirt cheap, right? Well, that's how a programmer thinks. Thinking like a project manager, one must remember that until you "interview" the client and collect some information, you wont know what to put on the page. And once you know what to put on the page and finish coding it, the result must be put on a server and the domain must be set up. And if the client doesn't have a domain name, you are going to go get that too. All of these things take time and must be considered in your pricing. If you don't, you aren't being fair to yourself.

With more than 1 page, you'll have to create a menu. If there are graphics, you'll need to create the images. If the pages use active scripting (php, asp, asp.net), the project is even more complex. If the page content is dynamic (database driven), things just got even more complex. If the site needs to interact with other resources, such as payment gateways, things have gotten even more complex.

So, think of each and every variant to the service you offer and assign a value to it. Then, when you are developing a quote, you can just add up all the values, remembering things like information gathering, etc. Then, you can apply the principle mentioned at the top of this post; if the value of the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts, bump the price to what you think it's worth.

And don't forget that often a client will complains about the price because they just don't know the value of what they are asking for. Don't be intimidated...

riley
 
Awesome, lots of good info here - also what do you guys/gals think about charging for hosting and maintenance (eg: changing text small content updates etc - i have written a nice CMS but its not perfect yet anyways selling maintenance and hosting bundled is great residual income right?)

Say i have a small company, gets 500 - 1000 hits a month, uses email alot small data though - lets say they use a gig of transfer or less, and I offer several updatesa included a month. well all know to open a psd or a fla or an html file and change text is easy and not time consuming, I am getting several real estate agents as clients and they pay 50 a month for hosting and updates. do you think this is fair in the circumstance or charge more>? what do you guys charge for monthly updates/hosting.

Also, Yash if you see this - did you get my ticket for designcop.com on the dns i submitted it but i dont really understand if the ticket goes to you, of my main account, thanks!
 
designcop said:
Awesome, lots of good info here - also what do you guys/gals think about charging for hosting and maintenance (eg: changing text small content updates etc - i have written a nice CMS but its not perfect yet anyways selling maintenance and hosting bundled is great residual income right?)
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Absolutely.

If you are hosting it, they should pay you for that hosting.

With regard to maintenance, the client should have 2 choices:
1) pay you to do the updates
2) pay more for the site so it includes pages with which the client can do his own maintenance.

Option 2 would, of course, be predicated on the site content being dynamic (db driven).

riley
 
designcop said:
Awesome, lots of good info here - also what do you guys/gals think about charging for hosting and maintenance (eg: changing text small content updates etc - i have written a nice CMS but its not perfect yet anyways selling maintenance and hosting bundled is great residual income right?)
Click to expand...
For myself my clients are all (relatively) larger companies that already have an existing server or server farm. In the cases where that isn't true I have sold them on their own JodoHost account (do we get kickbacks for that... no? drat) so that *I* am not the one to get the call at 2am with the "my website is down", tho if they do call I will make every effort to help figure out what the issue is.

I've given thought to offering hosting myself and have decided to pass on the idea for the time being. Maybe in another 6 months I'll have time (or money) to devote to administering a full time hosting service.

To answer the question about "residual income", I've seen a number of methods to take this into consideration. One that I saw wrapped a monthly maintenanace fee up with the hosting, included a number of hours of work per month (non-cumulative) as well as any updates to the applications. Another method I saw was to charge an annual license fee as opposed to one flat software fee.

I'm in the process of building a tool that I plan to put on the market. If it works out the way that I'm hoping it will then I plan on using a recurring license/membership fee to handle residuals... that's all I can say about that though.
 
designcop said:
Also, Yash if you see this - did you get my ticket for designcop.com on the dns i submitted it but i dont really understand if the ticket goes to you, of my main account, thanks!
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You submitted the ticket to the wrong ticket center. I just logged into your reseller account. Don't submit tickets to the Administrative control panel, that is your ticket system and where you will receive tickets from your customers

When you login to your reseller account, click on Support center in the screen that presents you the option to log into your administrative account

We have a 24x7 team of qualified system administrators to help you with your problems
 
guycre8ive said:
You guys get paid to develop WebSites? How lucky is that! I charged one of my clients a case of beer once.
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You're right, we are lucky, but seriously, you need to either quit or start charging real money please!! Unfortunately, people like you could put people like me out of business...

How would you feel if someone came to your place of work and offered to replace you and work for free?? LOL - don't take it personally, but I speak the truth and you know it!! ;)
 
guycre8ive said:
lol, I was just kidding there buddy. I charge! just got me a $2000 ecommerce site yesterday!!!
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i did wonder... unfortunately, there are plenty out there that charge well below reasonable prices who do us all a dis- service. so i still have some advice. Double it!!
 
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