[jwwest]

Are you trading your time for money, or are you trading your expertise for money? If the answer is time, you might as well find a decent paying factory job and make widgets all day.

The thing is, companies don't want to write software, they want to fix business problems. Writing software is just a path to that. So yes, you may charge more but you also have experience with their business and you've been there, helping them solve their problems (at least I hope you have).

It's a hard pill to swallow, but a client that won't consider the quality/history versus cost argument isn't worth having. They will continuously second guess you and you will spend more time managing them than getting work done.