Freelancers - how do you calculate charges?

[Guest]

Hi

I've been having a think about the best way to calculate my charges, cos I
always seem to end up undercharging my clients - things always take longer
than I expect them to.

I was wondering how other freelance web developers go about calculating
their charges?

If someone comes to you with a brief for a web application, how do you
calculate how long it will take you, and therefore how much to charge them?
Especially if there's something you're not quite sure how to achieve?

Thoughts? Solutions?

Cheers


Dan

 

[Mr Newbie]

Planning and experience is the key. One must carefully plan each stage of
the design, build and implementation together with a contingency for
remedial work if one is looking to quote the customer a fixed price.

One of the problems you seem to be facing is inexperience. Because the more
you have the easier it is to estimate the costs. If you are in this
situation then you canalso overestimate and price yourself out of the game.

You need to spend as much time thinking about the design as possible and the
difficulty you experience when doing this will be an indicator of the task
involved.

If you really cant get a good handle on the cost, dont price yourself into a
corner, try and get a more fluid contract which will include a priced
arcitecture phase which will give far more detail and hence give you and the
customer a better idea of time and cost for the final product.

HTH

 

[shiv_koirala]

HI there are many ways of doing it.

But the preliminary this is to break the whole project in to smaller
logical units. Example you have accounts application. So you have
voucher screen , ledger master etc etc.
You can the assign man/day of how much you will need to work on every
module. Your per day charge or per hour. Then jack up it with your
profit + some other over heads like electricity travelling etc etc.

Mostly companies use the following way :-

1) Function points
2) Use Case points
3) SMC ( Simple , medium complex)
4) COCOMO ( but now outdated)
and many others.Do not forget as you are charging as free lancer you
are only going to qoute for coding. If you are gfoing to do
documentation that is use case , UML etc etc hmmm the charges jack
up..This is my tutorial on how to prepare software quotations
http://www.geocities.com/shiv_koirala/

Regards ,
C#, VB.NET , SQL SERVER , UML , DESIGN Patterns Interview question book
http://www.geocities.com/dotnetinterviews/

 

[John MacIntyre]

Hi

I've been having a think about the best way to calculate my charges, cos I
always seem to end up undercharging my clients - things always take longer
than I expect them to.

I was wondering how other freelance web developers go about calculating
their charges?

If someone comes to you with a brief for a web application, how do you
calculate how long it will take you, and therefore how much to charge
them?
Especially if there's something you're not quite sure how to achieve?

Thoughts? Solutions?

Hi Dan,

I am also pretty poor at estimates ... even with the experience that saves
most others, I still haven't gotten it right. But here is something I've
come up with :

Unless you are handed good functional specs, break your service up into at
least 3 stages. At the end of each stage, you have a deliverable &
something to sign off on for the next stage. The client can decide to exit
the project at the end of each stage or get somebody else. When you think
about it, this is really the most responsible relationship you can have with
your client. Here are the 3 stages :
-Requirements - Do it in their office, and charge by the hour
-Functional Specs - Same as above (Delivered with an estimate for
development)
-Development

When you have the functional specs, you have something solid to base you
estimate on and are implicitly justified to ask for more money for each
change request.

Do you know how many projects I've worked on, where the client flip flops
all over the place on what the project should do? Even if I am the problem,
having the functional specs signed off on at least clarifies my
understanding and the problem is the clients if I was not corrected.

Another point that a friend of mine has made, is that without the functional
specs, your client ussually doesn't even know what he is paying for.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents .. I hope it helps.