Charging

When a friend OR anyone wants a website done...how do you go about charging them...do you tell them a rough amount...im having trouble right now ....

Shouldn't you work the price out before you start working on the website?

well, you kind of have to tell them exactly how much it will cost up front before you start on it... unless you are charging hourly with an estimate of how much time it will take. what specifically do you need help with? how much to charge? how to write up a quote? specifically how to deal with sites for friends?

I usually charge my friends sexual favors. Neither they nor I seem to mind.

hey - try to split the whole work in single tasks ... that made it much easier to me to calculate a prize...

First job is to enquire how much the client has set aside for the budget. Every client always has a figure in their head that they are willing to pay, getting to the bottom of that figure is always the most important part, when you know how much they have as a ballpark budget, you can then decide if they can afford that 3D Flash database driven novelty game or wether they will just get a plain HTML page.

It seems to publicly be a taboo subject to discuss what you charge for a website (not sure why). To decide what to quote a business client, decide how many hours you think you will realistically spend on the site and then multiply by your hourly rate.

::edit at the advice of my attorney; Deker, Deker, and Schmuck::


Hope this helps.

It's illegal to talk about what you charge, that's why it's taboo.

technically its not, tho the idea of price fixing apparently comes into play when discussing rates for certain types of work. i don't see how a discussion of how to set rates, figuring out project costs and ballparking costs, etc., could be called price fixing, tho i have seen similar topics on different boards shut down a number of times based on this reasoning.

and i like to charge a lot. if not a lot at least some, which is better than a little or not much. worst of all is none, don't charge that if you can help it.

chris

I just read somewhere that's it's illegal for competitor's in the same industry to discuss pricing methods, etc. I'm too lazy to look it up though. I think it was on the HTML writer's guild.

But I pretty much just make it up all the time. Depending on how long i think it will take, the anticipated traffic to the site, how much of an asshole the client is, etc.