hourly design rate
Out of context: Reply #24
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- phaln0
I usually calculate my estimated total hours then figure them into my hourly rates for each aspect of the site's development life cycle, for example only (not necessarily my rates):
$50 - Design
$60 - Front-End Development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript)
$75 - Backend Development (PHP/ASP/et al.)Then a standard 15% overhead to cover extraneous costs that may occur during the development of the site. For me, it's a nice buffer should things get hairy during development, and allows things like purchasing stock photos to not hurt my bottom line. However, if things don't get hairy and I don't end up spending it, it makes for a great selling point when I offer them the dollar equivalent of the 15% (or whatever's left) as a discount off their maintenance when the site's finished.
Now, this is for flat-fee sites, but it's easily converted to hourly by just transparently tacking on 15% to the hourly rate instead of a final flat-fee.
In my contracts (fixed-fee and hourly rate), I also ALWAYS have a "feature creep" clause that prevents overzealous clients from expecting me to jump out of bed at 2am to add an animated .GIF or add other features outside the scope of the project. It's hourly only and usually hovers around 1.25x-2x my normal hourly rate, depending on the project. It's the single easiest way to keep your clients focused during the development life cycle instead of getting delusions of grandeur.
If they want maintenance, then I charge the same rates (with a possible discount as mentioned earlier) as I would if I were just beginning on their site, but I lay out separate contracts for maintenance because my role can sometimes fall way out of alignment with the original contract's goals.