[thelist] My way to charge clients

[Ken Schaefer]

Any job where you are a <permanent/continuing/whatever you call it>
employee pays significantly less per hour than contract work.

Contractors generally need to charge more because:
a) what they make when working on contract needs to cover all those
times when they don't have any work (or they are doing non-revenue
raising, but business related activity, such as sorting out their
financial affairs)

b) they (generally) need to provide their own training, and their own
benefits (annual leave, sick leave, superannuation, etc)

As a full time employee, I'm earning about 60% of what I would be
earning on a contract basis on an hourly basis of each hour worked.
However, my overall income for the year would probably be about the
same.

Cheers
Ken


On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:53:04 -0700, Diane Soini
<dianesoini at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 21, 2004, at 04:33 PM,
> thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:
> >
> > For each page I set, I charge between 40-60 €. ( depending on the
> > amount of pages )
> > This is for html, css, js and xml.
> > php and asp pages are charged with 100 € / page. For more complex
> > sites sometimes more.
> > all together a small project ( up to 10 pages ) gives me 600 € to 800
> > €. without the design.
> 
> Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what is a "page"? I can see
> what it is for a static web site, but what if you have three templates
> that generate hundreds of pages? Is that three pages or hundreds?
> 
> As for the issue of what to charge, I cannot answer that, but I will
> share that I am in-house, know only a tiny bit of server scripting
> (perl, java, php), a significant amount of javascript, and I'm willing
> to hack at most anything else. I'm a pretty bad designer, but they
> think what I do is good enough. For all that, I get a significant
> amount less than $50 an hour (I really don't want to say it out loud!).
> But, I also have medical, dental, vision, paid time off, 401k, free
> health club etc. Don't forget your salary should consider that you have
> to purchase your own benefits (your government may give you more than
> the US does), and you'll have to also pay all the taxes yourself.  But,
> (and this is another snippet from that web design business kit), if a
> client fires you you will lose one client. If my boss fires me I lose
> it all.
> 
> Diane