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by TamDenholm 4727 days ago
As a counter point, i would argue that if you're billing on an hourly rate, you're limiting your earning potential as there's only so many hours in the day and a client will compare you to others in your industry if you charge by the hour. I'll continue to beat the drum of value based pricing as patio11 does too. Deliver a project that brings the client £10,000 worth of value and charge £1,000 for it and they wont give a shit if it takes you 1 hour or 1 week.
2 comments
emp_ 4727 days ago
Since I have trouble with the value extraction thing, something I also put in perspective is how fast can I finish this against the normal standards? If I can work much faster, have a well established codebase will all sorts of shortcuts to the solution, fixed price will allow me to get paid 10, 20 times more with it actually being cheaper than a normal hourly rate would cost.

Hourly makes you always take your time, I prefer to be able to compress 10 normal development hours into one as much as possible and have more free time.

For too long I have been punished for working fast with hourly rates, I avoid it like the plague. The next step after this are products.

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filozynka 4727 days ago
When you are developing the project further how would you like to value adding new functionalities to the project using the value based pricing model?
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lifeisstillgood 4727 days ago
How much value does the new feature bring to the client ?

Easy one: increase their conversion rate for google searches of keyword "blue widget" (ie google -> landing page -> credit card charged) by 5%. YOu just made them 5% of their annual turnover. Charge them a lot

Harder one: (Anything away from sales is always going to be harder to measure) Implement a simple custoemr support online chat featuire (you know the kind) - allows their support to deal with >1 person at a time, and reduces the "waiting" queue on the phone system to zero. Value? Dunno. Feel around by talking to the VP of customer service or make a judgement call like "not having to hire another five custoemr service people"

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iktorn 4727 days ago
This makes sense when you have a well established business that's tweaking it's processes. Impossible when building an MVP and/or experimenting.
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