Topic: Help: How much do I charge?

I was just put into contact with a man who is interested in having me keep his site updated for him. (My aunt knows him and thought of me :-)) I'm not sure how in-depth it will be, but probably pretty basic. After all, the site is already built to a degree, the hosting company offers site-building tools and he doesn't want to use anything else, since they are pretty simple. However, before I contact him about accepting the job, I wanted to get some input on what you think. How much should I charge? By hour? A monthly fee? I've never done anything like this where I wasn't already working for a company and helping out on this sort of thing. For this site, it will be a part-time thing I do from home, and I won't be doing anything else for the company. I don't want to rip him off-nor do I want to be shortchanged.

Any ideas?

Thanks!



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Well, you can do it in three ways as I see it.
1 - Strictly by the hour, if it's just a matter of updating content, make sure of how much/often he plans to update it, then set an hourly charge that you feel comfortable with.

2 - A fixed fee, this way he and you always knows what the cost/income is but you can get screwed badly if he starts changing a lot several times a week.

3 - A service agreement where he always buys X hours per month (and no savings between months), everything above that is billed by the hour. This is what I'd go for, One argument that actually works for him is the fact that he is more compelled to keep his site updated since he is paying you no matter what, which is better for his customers. It also gives you an outing to get payed for bigger jobs as/if they come along.

As for how much to charge?
Well that's impossible for me to say.
It depends on a lot of things.
- The hourly rates in your area.
- Do you have a company? If so what is your hourly cost? Use the cost and add the profit margin you want/need to that (usually 20-30%).
- Who will pay the taxes, you or him, add/subtract that from the hourly rate.
Now you should be roughly correct in pricing.

- Is this pocket money for you, in that case you can go cheaper, count on what you would have left after taxes if you had a company and place yourself there.

In Sweden a single person company doing simple web-work/updating would probably be charging somewhere around SEK 350-500/hour which would be about $40 - $58 /hour.
In that amount the cost for taxes, office rent, software, everything you can think of would be included, plus a margin.

Left to live on after taxes and so on would probably be about $16-17.
(Now this is Sweden where the government is insane on taxes on small buisinesses)
Hopefully you can get an idea on how to calculate your rate from this.
/Dan

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