[enobrev]

In all, I agree with billing at a daily rate. Personally I bill in half day increments for minor maintenance with smaller loyal clients and daily or even weekly for significant slices of work. A worthwhile client won't pay much attention to how things break down in smaller increments provided they know up front that there is a minimum block.

One of the healthy side effects is that you'll rarely end up with the "can you just quickly add x" requests, which can be far more time consuming.

[effbott]

>One of the healthy side effects is that you'll rarely end up with the "can you just quickly add x" requests

Up until now I've always billed by the hour, but this sentence alone has convinced me to switch over to daily. Those "10 minute" requests drive me absolutely insane. Even though that time is billable it takes a large toll on my mental well-being.

[saturdayplace]

And really, that's the entire point: as a developer your effectiveness in smaller time increments is usually limited. Context switching has a cognitive cost that's generally paid in larger time chunks, so it makes sense to set your client expectations in those terms.

And regardless of the time it takes you to deliver something, they should be paying you in terms of the value they get from it.