Actually, no. But I can see why you would think that. I literally don't know the range of what is reasonable and what is not. Your comment is implicitly informative, though. Furthermore, if I was being boastful, I would probably not be hiding behind an anonymous account.
Boasting usually isn't done to make other people feel bad; it's to make the boaster feel good. This post could serve that purpose even anonymously. If people confirm that you indeed are being highly compensated, that could make you feel good about yourself.
Could you add estimates of the amount of time each site took you (in hours), not including time spent teaching yourself, but including all time spent writing code, corresponding with clients, etc.?
You got downmodded for complaining about being downmodded. The anchor price for generic (solo, incl. project management and interaction design, but excluding graphic design) web dev is ~$120/hr, but Rails and Django people are hard to find right now.
iPhone rates seem to top out at around $200/hr, and iPhone devs "feel" like the hardest consultants to hire right now, so there's your range.
Note that these rates bear no resemblence at all to what a big firm would get. There are all sorts of other risks big firms mitigate that you can't. [%]
[%] (to wit: the risk of negotiating with your brain fully engaged)
Precisely. As well as the increased risk of having no contracts for long-stretches of time, and the additional overhead time of promotion, customer relations, etc.
It seems to me that you got seriously shafted on that deal. I don't think that the app I made was much more complex, i.e. I probably maybe spent 10x as much time as you did on that one, but I made 200x more money doing it. The pricing of these things seems to be very subjective to me, and contingent on numerous factors including: How much they've actually got to pay for it? How much they think they can get away with? How much they think someone else would bill them for it? How much their friends tell them it should cost? What is the actual application? How much incremental money do they stand to make as a result of its existence? And very little with how much time/effort actually goes into it on your part. Ofhand, you could have easily made at least $5k on that site. And if it was for a more general purpose, i.e. as opposed to just one dealership, you could have made much more.
The problem with billing by the hour is that developer performance varies by a factor of 10x or more, whereas hourly fees vary by about 5x. And most clients would not feel comfortable playing $250-$300/hour unless there was some way for them to justify it. (i.e. more people involved, despite the fact that they may do nothing). Besides, why charge per hour? If I solve your problem, what does it matter how long it took me to do it?
I was not saying that you should charger per hour. I was asking that the numbers you floated will make more sense if you can provide how much time you spent on each of those projects. For example: you mentioned $100k on RoR project. This number will make more sense if you mention whether it took you 1000 hours or 10000 hours or maybe 3 months or 3 years.
Oh, I see what you mean. It probably took about 1000 hours total, but spanned over a period of a year. So maybe 20 hours per week. I was just learning Rails at the time, so it took a bit longer than it otherwise would have. I could probably make what I made in about 1 to 2 months tops now.
I should probably mention that even though I spent 20h/day working on it, I spent/spend virtually every waking hour either reading/writing/thinking about writing software/business. I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't party. I live with my fiancee, and work pretty much every waking hour on something or other. I don't have a blog because it would consume too much time, and I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve. I worry that I may be going insane, but only passively.
I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve.
Didn't you say you used RoR? You're okay with using other folks high-level code, but you think interacting with them will pull you towards the middle of the bell curve. Interesting.
I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve
This will almost surely be damaging to your career and education. If this means that you are too easily influenced or cannot identify a good influence, then I would focus on improving that in yourself.
Surrounding yourself with intelligent people in a field such as this is incredibly important. You are missing out otherwise.
hmm. even for a year's worth of work it seems like a good price.
100k/year gross working only 20 hours a week is pretty badass if you ask me. The average (full-time) web developer salary according to salary.com is 70k/year.
the reason why many of us charge by the hour is that it requires less negotiation. When is the project 'done'? a flat rate contract requires a lot of work up front to define things that might be better defined after you are most of the way done. Hourly rates make last minute changes simple, and mean that you don't have to argue if it's a last minute change or not.
it also means that the employer bears more of the risk if the work is harder than originally imagined.
(Now, I also agree with your points about why charging a flat rate is better; I'm just pointing out that there are also reasons why charging an hourly rate is better.)
