Rates for web development

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eggrock

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 1, 2003
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I don't do web development for a living but a friend would like me to set up a site for him. I want to give him a good price but the figures I'm seeing online are all over the place, anywhere from $30/hour to well over $100/hour.

What I'll be creating is:

- Several static pages to illustrate the benefits of the product (a new-ish type of fabric--the site itself will sell clothing apparel.)

- A shopping cart--I'm going with OSCommerce for now.

The shop will need several restricted access areas. One will be for volume buyers and others will be branded to specific companies (and show only their product). Some buyers will NOT be billed electronically.

The site will also need to allow other people to login and upload/maintain apparel and prices as they change.

Everything else is detail, for example allowing (password protected) downloads of the purchases in something like QuickBooks format, offline presentation materials and so on.

I'm tentatively figuring $40/hour for 50 hours worth of work, $2000 total. Does that sound about right?

Payment is not an issue to me other than to get my friend a good deal. Learning, word of mouth and being able to leverage him for other business deals will be the big payoff for me.
 
...and literally two seconds after I clicked Submit my friend called and said $2k was okay with him. Still, I'm wondering what the going rate is for general web development and CGI scripting. I'll have to learn some PHP (but I know Perl well so that won't be too painful.)
 
Can't comment on current rates as it has been a while since I've worked with web design but generaly with web design you charge by the job. Not by the hour. Otherwise if you think it will take 50 hours you quote the 50 hours but thats what you end up getting even if you go over.
 
Hourly or flat rate is more of client preference. More times than not, I work flat rate, but its more of the norm than an actual standard.

Tough to say how much you should charge hourly. Here in NYC, good freelancers work anywhere from $50-$100+.Not sure if 50 hours is enough to cover the job, depending on the exact scope and deliverables, but if you feel confident with it, I'd say 2k is fair.
 
I dont know about flat rates, you will likely have to do a little more work than you wanted and have your friend change what he wants towards the end.
 
well the going rate depends vastly on your experience and skill. if you have no experience with php and you're working on a php app i would not think you could "morally" charge someone what an experienced php programmer would charge.
 
hofan41 said:
well the going rate depends vastly on your experience and skill. if you have no experience with php and you're working on a php app i would not think you could "morally" charge someone what an experienced php programmer would charge.
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That's where I was going with it. I'm guessing that it will probably take me somewhere around 100 hours to get this done, with about half being a learning process. I know Perl well enough that PHP shouldn't be much of a learning curve.
 
Pricing is all over the place with lower-end web development. I have had some people do work that worked out to ~$8/hour that were fantastic, and others that were paid $35/hour who were terrible. A lot depends on how efficient the person is. It is not uncommon for faster coders to work 4x as fast as slower coders. That has to be worked into pricing from your end.
 
If you're new to PHP and also have no experience with osCommerce, you're going to be in for one hell of a ride. 50 hours will likely not be enough. There are a huge amount of contributions written for osCommerce that will help you get the features you need without coding them from scratch. However, it can be a huge hassle to get them all to play nice with each other. Most of them are under the assumption that you are starting with a clean install of osc. As you add more and more features, you no longer have that clean base install, and it gets much more difficult to to add more features. Also, the current stable release of osc is fairly old and not very well written, especially when it comes to the HTML. I would highly suggest you look at Zen Cart instead. It is based on osc, but has had huge portions of it updated or rewritten completely. A lot of the features you would have to add yourself are standard in Zen Cart. While Zen Cart has far fewer contributions available, you will find you just don't need as many to gain the features you desire. And creating your own from scratch is significantly easier.
 
i960 said:
If you're new to PHP and also have no experience with osCommerce, you're going to be in for one hell of a ride. 50 hours will likely not be enough. There are a huge amount of contributions written for osCommerce that will help you get the features you need without coding them from scratch. However, it can be a huge hassle to get them all to play nice with each other. Most of them are under the assumption that you are starting with a clean install of osc. As you add more and more features, you no longer have that clean base install, and it gets much more difficult to to add more features. Also, the current stable release of osc is fairly old and not very well written, especially when it comes to the HTML. I would highly suggest you look at Zen Cart instead. It is based on osc, but has had huge portions of it updated or rewritten completely. A lot of the features you would have to add yourself are standard in Zen Cart. While Zen Cart has far fewer contributions available, you will find you just don't need as many to gain the features you desire. And creating your own from scratch is significantly easier.
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QFT .... use the search in order to see the other amount of ample posts on the same topic. If you aren't familiar with the languages then don't think you can pick it up quickly or easily.

Can't give you any more advice than what's already been stated.
 
We saw the CV of a senior level contractor with 20+ years experience asking for £375 per day, about £47 per hour (US$100/hr). He'd likely see half that in take home, gross.

He's a Ruby on Rails developer and so am I.
 
I do contract work and I charge between $35-50/hr with the median being somewhere around $40. I've gone as far as $75 an hour before.
 
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