Just wondering what most of you charge per hour, or per month on Maintenance fees on sites. or do you offer this free to all your web design clients?

Also how do you determine the cost of the websites. Go by an hourly rate or by how much work, and time and may take and go from there?

Thanks,

Regular hourly rate * amount of time needed to do the work. I prorate in five minute increments, but 15/30 minute increments are not uncommon. By-the-hour is robbery, in my opinion.

Everything is quoted though. I use my rate as a basis, and I estimate my time. Then the client gets a straight quote.

Originally posted by the_pm
Regular hourly rate * amount of time needed to do the work. I prorate in five minute increments, but 15/30 minute increments are not uncommon. By-the-hour is robbery, in my opinion.

Everything is quoted though. I use my rate as a basis, and I estimate my time. Then the client gets a straight quote.

what an regular hourly rate you charge if you don't mind me asking.

I know we used to charge $20CAD/hr and if they choose to host of our Sister site then we would charge $10/hr..

We would just basicly say ok it should take us say 50 hours to complete and finish this job so you pay as 10*50hrs and if we go over we don't charge you, but if we go under we still get paid for the 50hrs, or give the option of doing it by the hour and just log in to a section of our website, which they can see, when we are working on it.

the only time we usually offer the #hrs * 10/20 rate is if it is like an ecom site or something that we know will prob take us an X amount of hrs.

But I was curious of what a good hourly rate is Iw ould think anything between 10-25$ an hour?

am I right? or is it more?

I would just charge a fee for however long it takes to carry out the assigned work. :)

As an independent contractor, my hourly rate will be much less than that of a design firm, but an hourly rate reflects one's knowledge, reputation and the quality and value of the work one is able to do for a client. I currently charge $40/hr. Technically, it is illegal to discuss pricing amongst "competitors" in the U.S. and Canada, but I publicly advertise my price through my site and marketing collateral, so I feel pretty safe disclosing it openly here.

It's rare to find a group, firm or essentially any brick-and-mortar company charging less than $50-60/hr. $80-100 is typical, and higher end companies can justify charging $150-200/hr. for certain types of work. It all depends on what you bring to the table. If you believe the value of your work is $20/hr., and that value is easily communicated to a customer, then that's the price you offer.

But in the end, I would give a quote for each bit of work that needs done, or consider allowing people to purchase blocks of time in advance for the work you do and have those blocks in the bank, so to speak.

I would offer The main design, for a one time cost, then a monthly fee for maintenence DEPENDING on if it is a site that gets updated a lot. It is a site that never gets updated like a site for example (as simple as whatismyip.com) you dont update that site so i wouldnt charge anyything for them. But for a new related site who updated everyday. I could charge like 100 a month. That is if you update every day. Then if you update once a week id say like ten dollars a month or somethin like that, you get the point.

I say either

(1) Charge by time. Have a rate and charge at that rate at a minimum interval (I agree 1hr is way high, but 5-30min seems reasonable). As you get better/do stuff more frequently you will get an idea of how much time it takes to do tasks.

When I build a site I create template pages. So if a client needs a new page from one of the templates I created for them I can have a set fee for 1 page where I insert just data, another fee for data and a picture, etc... If they need a new nav button that does not require site design adjustments (which I almost always make sure they do not) I can add a new nav tab and change the entire site, but that may take a little more time so that will be another set fee. So a rate is good, and knowing the time tasks take will help with this.

(2) Offer a maintenence hosting plan. Lets say your base hosting plan which you provide as a service (no use competing with commodity hosting that overload their servers, have who knows what scripts running on the box, and usually offer poor support) is $50 (made up number... I know that is insane for most sites). And lets say your base rate is $100/hr. You can package the hosting and the maintenence time together at a savings, say $100-$125/mo. And if you are really nice you let the time rollover 1 or 2 months.

A combination of #1 and #2 could work well as a selling point.

But each client is different and has different needs. And the above are just general suggestions, there are other ways to do what you want.