[Udo]

I've been working as a freelancer for a bit more than a year now and let me offer a counter perspective.

This article is a report from the absolute bottom. Part of the problem is the clientele: data scraping jobs are the shadiest, worst-paid jobs you can take on as a programmer. Also, offering the client to pay what they think is fair is a monumentally bad idea.

The bigger problem is the perception of value. I regularly get requests for doing insane amounts of work (usually it involves cloning a multi-million dollar site or app) for less than I charge for a single day. There are "idea people" out there, who think the goal to success is paying someone 300 bucks to implement a clone of the Android app store. It's a real example by the way. I mainly get my work through the Who Is Hiring thread on HN, and although the overall client quality has been high, it's unavoidable that over half of all requests are absolute bogus.

I suspect I'm not the only one having this experience. Now, these inquiries can be effortlessly ignored (I usually do answer them back with or without a short statement why I'm not taking the job) - however, if you're just scraping by, these "gigs" can totally demoralize you.

To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing, and they do not view it as skilled labour. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. After high school, twenty years ago, a friend and I got into freelancing. A lot of inquiries were pretty much the same as they are now. My friend used to say we should rebrand ourselves as the Web Sherpas, named after the local people who often get hired for grating or dangerous work on behalf of tourists yet receive little compensation for it.

To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough, and you're going to need a financial buffer to do this. But it's definitely the only way to go. People taking $15/hour data scraping jobs are part of the problem because they help distort the value perception of our profession (plus they help making the internet a worse place). Don't be that person.

[user_0001]

>To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing

+1

And any changes you are asked to make are not "easy" nor "quick" nor could they "do it in an hour if I knew how"

I like to give the example that if you were having a house built, when they were putting the final touches to it, painting the walls, screwing lightbulbs etc. It may delay the house being ready, it may cost a bit more if you decide you want to move the house by 1 metre to the left, change the load bearing walls.

Yet they think similar changes to a project should take no time nor cost a thing.

And the best of all "just build something so I can see it then I will know what I want" but I won't pay you for that.

>To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough

Can also be impossible if you have bills to pay, a family to support, are just starting out. I've been there (move to the tropics with a young family during the economic down turn, the few contacts I had who had promised work before I left were unable to deliver when I arrived (took the best part of two years wandering around the world to get to the destination).

But good clients are out there. I still do the odd bit of work for a couple of clients I got in the early days (<$15 ph data scraping jobs lol). Financially these days isn't worth doing, but they paid on time, offered to pay for time to discuss changes, offered pay for changes, so like to help them out with the odd bits of work they have as they have had many problems with freelance devs (just like I had with other clients)

[caseysoftware]

All of that is why I wrote this:

http://caseysoftware.com/blog/so-you-want-to-build-an-app

[robotkilla]

I've been a freelancer for almost 4 years and I have yet to make money via any sort of website. The clientele's expectations are borderline delusional for the price they want to pay.

I get all of my contracts through recommendations from past clients and colleagues and can charge from $60 to $90 per hour (the most I charged was $250 per hour for a job I didn't want to do and didn't expect the client to accept).

[zippergz]

I don't know where you're located, but $60/hr seems insanely low. Annualized as a full time job that's $125k/yr. not terrible, but quite a bit less than what a good developer can make as base salary at a tech company. But that tech company job comes with benefits, paid vacation, stability, and possibly equity and bonuses. Plus the freelance gigs are rarely actually full time (even if you have enough clients on a steady basis, you need some time to manage the business itself). I can't imagine going freelance if $60/hr was what I was able to bill...

[mattchew]

Location makes a big difference. I live in the Midwest and there aren't many $125K positions out here. But a 3 BR house in good shape in a decent neighborhood can be less than 100K.

Freelancing at $~60/hour * ~30 hours/week can work fine here. You can raise a family on it no problem. You're not going to retire early this way, but different strokes for different folks.

[robotkilla]

Exactly - my goal has been self improvement / preservation over the last few years, not wealth, and I've been achieving this goal:

1. brought my suicidal depression back down to regular occasional depression

2. brought stress levels down to manageable

3. learned / learning 3 new programming languages, 2 platforms and 2 game engines and developed skills in pixel art.

achieved this by making money a secondary priority and living a life of near seclusion in my apartment (do have a daughter here 2 weeks per month and live with my gf so i'm not completely secluded).

edit: i've only worked 6 months this year and spent the rest improving my game dev skills. I usually take on 3 month contracts and then break for 1 to 3 months before my next.

[JabavuAdams]

> I don't know where you're located, but $60/hr seems insanely low

Where are you located?

What's the median (not mean) cost of a detached family home, where you live?

In your situation, do you have to work 5 days a week, or do you work fewer?

Could you just decide on any given day that you don't feel like doing any work, and do something else, instead?

All relevant questions. SF and NY are not the only cities in the world with excellent software developers.

[mamcx]

Country-specific. $60/hr for me well be great!.

[robotkilla]

^ which is probably also why i can't charge more than $60. How can you compete with poland / india / etc when they are able to charge less?

[robotkilla]

Based in the midwest. I agree that $60 per hour is low. If you know of anyone who will pay more, please send them my way :)

[wikwocket]

If you ever charged $250 an hour (even if that was the "I hate you go away" rate), then congrats, that's your new hourly rate. Everyone paying less is getting a screaming deal on the friends and family plan.

Try charging more for new clients, and walking your rate up each year for existing clients. In my experience this results in one awkward phone call/email exchange a year and approximately zero negative side effects.

This is how I brought my rate from $30 an hour to $90, also in the Midwest.

[robotkilla]

> that's your new hourly rate

I don't think this is the case. The client was volatile (random screaming and swearing at people in the office and me in my first and only meeting with him, plus a vague personal threat made against me if I were to "fuck him on the contract").

I knew what I was walking into and boosted my price accordingly. The only reason he went for it is due to having (or at least thinking he had) no other options. I worked fast and was extremely careful with my time. Everything went well, he paid me and I never heard from that company again.

> walking your rate up each year for existing clients

How do you get repeat business? It seems that my clients are happy with me after each project (no complaints and I typically get recommendations) however I haven't had any repeat business. I suspect this is due to working with very small startups with low budgets.

[monknomo]

Try periodic emails to past clients - I hire quite a few contractors and I like it when they check in and am more likely to go for someone who has done something good and kept in touch periodically.

[sqldba]

I absolutely agree. For freelance/contract work the price should be about double expected base salary.

First of all because agencies get away with charging that much so you're just undercutting yourself needlessly unless you join in.

But secondly because there are big costs; liability insurance and software licensing being some of them.

[robotkilla]

The problem is that I typically work for small startups that don't have a big budget to work with.

I'm also not sure what sort of data the people in this thread are working with. I can't make $125k per year in the midwest as a fulltime developer (unless I'm freelancing - and even then keeping steady contracts has been near impossible). In fact I'm not seeing those numbers anywhere outside of the west coast - I applied for a fulltime job in CO recently and they balked at $90k... said they couldn't go over $60k.

Edit: recently quoted a local client at $75 per hour... he looked visibly perturbed and never got back to me.

A few contracts back I quoted $80 per hour and was told max budget was $60/hour (which I had to accept out of desperation).

I hear a lot of talk on the internet (especially HN) about people making massive amounts of money as contractors, but I have yet to see this in action. On the other hand $10k per month isn't that bad.

[mgkimsal]

"First of all because agencies get away with charging that much"

Perhaps they deliver a different sort of value than an individual freelancer? Having a larger staff, having multiple people with different expertise, separate billing/financial folks, admin folks, etc. They provide a different set of services and customer experience - some people want/need that, some don't, but just because agency ABC is charing $200/hr doesn't mean every else can "get away with that" as well. Just being able to have 4 people work simultaneously on a project may be worth the increased pricing for some clients.

Liability insurance isn't that big a cost, and unless you're focused on some really niche industry, "software licensing" probably isn't that big a deal for an individual freelancer. I'd be surprised if even with multiple systems, those combined costs are more than a couple thousand per year (much less for most people I know).

Health insurance is going to be a far bigger expense than almost everything else put together for most folks.

[sqldba]

Fair points, you're thinking on a different scale for me. The agencies I'm thinking of were little more than chop shops who hire and then resell. The only positive they could give you is if someone is sick they can back fill; but having seen it in action that's really just someone unfamiliar with the processes warming a seat for a few days and not doing much.

MSDN $2kpa. Liability $1kpa. I guess it's not "a lot" but if you're only doing a little work (as I was) it was a substantial portion of the profit gone; I spent more on hardware though.

[mgkimsal]

It's all perspective. My hourly rate is in three figures, which, for a lot of people looking at me as an individual freelancer, seems high. But the local mid-sized agencies all charge in that range for someone with my skillset anyway. But... that's not how I justify my rate, which is what my original reply was about. And... there are some things I simply can't offer - I can't parallelize my efforts like a larger agency can, which may definitely be worth it for people trying to hit specific market deadlines.

I don't even do MSDN costs. :) But there are definitely some overheads - insurance, I have office space (coworking), services (bookkeeping, etc), transportation - conferences, etc. I may have, say, $12k in overhead each year - including health insurance. That cost is pretty much the same whether I bring in $15k or $150k, and certainly if you're bringing in $15k, those expenses are far higher % of income.

[jedrek]

...in a handful of markets.

[WhitneyLand]

It looks like most of the jobs on HN are full time gigs. Are you pinging them to ask about freelance work?

[Udo]

I mistyped, too late to edit it now: I meant to say the "Freelancer" thread. I don't have to contact anyone myself. In fact, I never had much success getting business from people who didn't contact me first.

[mrfusion]

I was going to ask the same thing. It seems kind of spammy to me.

[mkagenius]

freelance can be a full time job. I am guessing all the "remote" tagged jobs posted here can be considered.