[ido]

Is it steep?

I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer.

So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me.

Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.

[acveilleux]

Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work.

It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.

[hoof_marks]

That's a reasonable salary. But when you have to add the overheads + profits i guess the piece work project will come out costly.

[hoof_marks]

true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.

[ido]

Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage.

So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more.

EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.

[hoof_marks]

Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.

[ido]

I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)