| Pros of charging hourly: 1. You penalize people who are wasting your time with trivial work like testing or not refactoring. 2. You can part time, or do a major project in parallel. E.g. work on the train, or while teaching classes. 3. Suitable for work where there's a lot of time consuming back and forth and experimentation, like working with APIs, CSS, copywriting, UX design. 4. You simply want to do other things the rest of the day - go to the bank, play video games. Pros of charging daily: A. If you have a lot of non billable hours. For example, you do a lot of hard work and need lots of rest. B. Works better where there's less trust in the contractor. Sometimes when you don't trust yourself either. C. Suited for deep work, which is hard to get into under pressure of hourly billing. D. More room to research, where you don't want to feel guilty spending a lot of time researching something. E. Less switching costs because your whole day is dedicated to only one thing. For stuff like machine learning as opposed to front end web dev, perhaps daily rate is best. |