How much to charge

[JamesBarnsley]

Hi,

How much should I be charging for valid xhtml / css website with quality graphics and design?

How much should I be charging for custom php coding?

There are many bidding sites out there where people are paying like £200 for all this? Is this normal?

How do you get above the “cheap” website market?

I think in real industry companies must be charging 1000’s of pounds so how is it that these bidding sites are only charging 200 pounds.

[soap]

200 pounds for a website is not something you want to be charging. To get above that market you get really good and produce very beautiful and valuable products.

I started out charging about $500 for a website. This was when I was first starting out about seven years ago.

Now I work with two other fellows and I won’t name exact prices but the jobs we do are always in the thousands.

For instance, right now we are bidding on a job which is near $100,000. Granted, this is a very major job and will take some months and we may not even get it. Hopes are high though :)

[ccc630]

James,

There’s no way to offer a realistic answer to your question without specific details. Is the project a five-page static site or a complex, dynamic corporate site? Are the graphics supplied or created by you? Does custom php coding refer to a hand-rolled inventory/shopping cart system, or tweaking a WP theme? Along with these and myriad other variables, location obviously plays a huge part — different markets support different fair-value rates. A firm in New York or London is going to command higher rates than a firm in a rural location — and, also, firms will almost always command higher rates than a freelancer.

In terms of the bidding sites, I used to do a lot of freelance writing through one site and eventually gave it up due to continually being underbid (by a very significant margin). The simple fact was that people in different regions could afford to work far cheaper than I could. Give up on those sites and market yourself locally and on sites that offer the fee structures you’re looking for.

Good luck — I’m in the same situation, trying to establish myself and build a business, so I understand your frustration. It takes time; just keep at it!

Chris Clark

[chrisburton]

The cheap website market is just that. Cheap. Poor “web 2.0” coding and design. These people try to get the most of the market by pricing low and that is why they always fail.

[drake]

@soap – how did you find your first clients?

[TheDoc]

Everyone’s expenses are different, and everyone values their time differently. The company that I work for charges out at $100/hr, but we have to pay wages, rent for the office, health care, etc etc. Those projects are almost always over $100k.

When I freelance on my own I usually deal with smaller projects, anywhere between $800 and $1500 and on average charge about $40/hr.

[JamesBarnsley]

What would I need to be able to work $100k+ or $50k+

What would I need in my portfolio to be able to do that, what other things would I need.

[ccc630]

@James, a clarification, please: are you looking to land $50k+ projects as a freelancer, or as an employee of a firm?

[soap]

@drake It was mostly just word of mouth. The better you get the more confident you get in asking for more money. To work on a $50k job by yourself would be a handful to say the least. You need lots of hands on these large projects for it not to take years.

[JamesBarnsley]

@ccc630 I am a freelancer, however I also have another website with numerous other freelancers which could kinda be classed as a firm.

[TheDoc]

@JamesBarnsley At my full time job, where we bid on $100k+ projects, we are a team of seven, two of which are purely project management. As a company grows so does its clientele, certainly didn’t start with those projects!

[JamesBarnsley]

What kind of projects did you start with?

[Johnnyb]

It makes me laugh as the company I work for charges a base rate of $165/hour for design work which they then delegate to a web designer like me. I then do the same work as a freelancer for $40/hour. The quality and outcome of the work is the same, yet it’s almost impossible for me to charge anywhere near $165 as a freelancer.

In regards to landing big projects, the company I work for does work for huge clients (American airlines, coca cola, merrill lynch etc..) and they seem to land most of the jobs through consulting companies who contract these projects out to us on a regular basis.

[drake]

@tannercampbell – can you give an example of some sites for which you would charge $1800? They do not have to be sites that you designed, just of comparable quality.

All these numbers mean nothing without some context of the quality of the sites.

I just saw a sites that a design company charged $4500 that looks very amateurish with some very bad mistakes and I am flabbergasted the customer is satisfied.

[noahgelman]

Also area is a factor when building a site. You would probably have to charge less building a site in Wisconsin than you do in California. In California has more money on average so thinks are more expensive, like websites. Depending on how I feel about the project, the client, and what my schedule looks like, I charge anywhere from $50-$70.

[Author]

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