[MortenK]

"In high-end contracting work, daily rates are industry standard. If you have the option to bill on a daily increment, why would you ever bill hourly?"

This advice is rather black and white, making it not exactly spot on for a large variety of cases. "X is an industry standard" is also rarely entirely correct. Ex. While daily rate might be standard in the UK and US, Scandinavian rates are almost always hourly based. Russian and ukranian as well, and most likely a whole range of other locations I know nothing about.

If you contract for a professional services firm that re-bill your hours, you're going to have an explanation problem when they see 3 hours logged and a full day billed. Conversely, the "full day" is easily stretched by a client-in-need into 10 or 12 hours, which leaves your hourly income plummeting by 25-50%

In this particular case, your best bet by far is to bill hourly. This applies to a variety of other cases as well, which is why there is no such thing as a universally applicable approach on consultancy billing, and such really shouldn't be given or taken without a huge disclaimer.

[sarciszewski]

I've been informed by evil bastards whom love to outsource that Ukrainians are perfectly happy with $5 per hour.

[ddebernardy]

You can get a junior for as little as $2/hour, if you need code grunt tasks done.