[davismwfl]

For context, I have owned a couple of different consulting firms since the late 1990's, and have made a ton of mistakes and learned a great deal (still am).

The advice for value vs hourly, weekly etc is really highly dependent on the type of work you are doing. I routinely give this advice, but if you looked at the majority of our development work we get paid weekly per resource. Where we do value based pricing (and where I suggest it) is not generally on active software development projects where we are slinging code. Instead, we use it more where we are the experts brought in for training, education or business/technical reviews. In that way your risk is significantly lower but the value to the client is, many times, much higher than your hourly wage would dictate. For example, a business might easily pay $5,000 + travel expenses for a 3 day on-site training package that if you charged by the hour might net you $3k or so.

In some instances when we feel very confident of the project or the scope is extremely small, we will value price it so we can make a better margin. Although I do this less and less if there is every code being written.

Overall, the other comments are generally pretty accurate. Hourly/weekly pricing tells the client they are paying for effort not a specific result as it will likely change based on their input (although this can still get ugly sometimes). Additionally, any fixed rates generally lead to almost an unchecked scope creep that makes life unbearable for a small team.