[sanderjd]

On the flat rate model: I like to tell the story that the highest hourly rate I've ever earned to date was as a college student when I took on a fixed rate project to fix some department's "we have a web form that is critical to our work and backed by this perl cgi script that used to work but doesn't do anything anymore" problem.

Turned out someone had uploaded the perl script to a Linux server using dreamweaver on a Mac, and the line endings were wrong. So I ran dos2unix on it and added a blurb to some documentation on what not to do and how to fix it again if necessary.

Made $1000 for less than 15 minutes of work!

But of course I also could have spent two weeks bashing my head against an awful perl script, never figured it out, and made nothing. It's a risk/reward trade-off.