Re: Pricing for PHP programming???

I get flamed for this sometimes, but we don't normally charge an hourly rate for a project. After-project maintenance, yes, but for an initial project we normally quote a fixed price. The price will cover a minimal hourly rate to cover our costs, but we don't normally cap it on the top by saying "that's 200 hours at $125/hour so it's $25,000" (or whatever it would be). Rather, we try to gain as much info as we can about the project and it's relative value to the business. If someone is having us build a system that will net them a direct cost reduction of $2 million dollars per year, we will take that into consideration. Some people think that's gouging, but we don't see it like that. On the flip side of that, we've taken on projects at lower than normal rates because the job was cool, but the value to the business just wouldn't be all that much. No sense in charging someone $10,000 for an inventory system when they only do $20k/year in sales, for example. Shane McBride wrote: > I know this is not really a PHP question, but it should make for a good thread. :) > > I was wondering what other PHP people charge to write PHP? I have just been given a project for > a fairly large customer, much larger than I normally do work for. So I am VERY confused.concerned > about how to price it. Most of my other PHP projects have been done for small single owners > businesses, and the PHP has been pretty basic. > > Now that I can actually do what I am being asked without have to learn it, I am stuck. I did a > shopping cart for someone, but I didn't charge them a REAL price because I didn't know how > to do it with PHP. So, I of course didn't charge the client for my learning curve. > > I know the price is very dependant upon the task. What I am doing is creating a web-based > front-end for a MySQL database. I'll need to create the database tables, etc. The front-end is > going to be rather dynamic since the data content depends largely on the previous choices of the > end-user. One or two tables with 20-30 fields. 5-6 pages of html and PHP. > > I'm just scouting this out, and am VERY confident with the contributors to this list and > their opinions. > > TIA, > Shane