Looking for guidance on a freelance project.
Hi! I don’t talk too much in the server however I’d love any advice on a personal project I’m more than halfway through, Currently I’m an aspiring junior developer not currently in a developer role.
Roughly 3 months ago my driving instructor gave me a chance to create an app for him (fully paid) and it’s taken me around that time and 40+ hours to get to around the end of making it.
I haven’t asked him about his budget and he hasn’t mentioned it either, Soon I’ll bring it up however I’m unsure how much to charge him for the app itself considering I’m doing front-end work, middle & back-end and even learning the languages while developing the app.
The app itself is not made or inspired from any online free templates and is from files I alone made, It has two ends:
One end is an admin perspective (instructor) that’s able to schedule booked lessons via a database
The other end is a customer perspective that allows for people to book & pay for lessons that someone may want.
Fully secure and the database has great security with each password hashed.
So my question for anyone able to give advice is: What do you think I should charge for this project? Seeing as it’s my first paid project I’d really love to make a good opportunity for this as it can bring me more work.
Thank you for any help/advice given, Please feel free to ping me!
35 Replies
I don't have much in the way of advice for an actual price, but like... you generally agree upon payment before any work is done. You set conditions for delivery and payment and stuff, then do the work once you have a contract that you can hold someone to
very generally, you would take your hours worked and multiply by your desired hourly rate, which should be at least 2.5x the wage you want to be making cause you've got a ton of overhead working as a freelancer (admin, sales, downtime between jobs...), then add any licensing costs
it also sounds like you're talking ongoing support, and that needs to be charged at a minimum rate too if they expect you to stay available
and you'll either want them to buy hosting directly, or very carefully match your contract with them with the contract you have with the hosting provider, including how long the contract lasts for and any penalties for cancelling early
plus you want some overhead on that cost, because you have to do admin work for that too, and cover your ass in case they ever don't pay
I don't really have anything more specific to add, but I do want to point out that if you click the bell at the top, then select all messages, it'll ping you for every message in just this post:
Thank you! That helps a lot
One little tip I'd like to give you is to omit implementation details like that. Anybody who doesn't know what you're talking about won't care and those who do will just end up asking more questions "How are you hashing them? Are the passwords salted? What hashing alg do you use? How do you handle your auth tokens?...."
When communicating about the project to customers it's better to just start out with vague terms like "State of the art security" or stuff like that. Not buzz words like 'military grade encryption', just standard industry language that's understandable for laymen. Of course if they're interested you can go into as much detail as you want. But in the end customers just care about the overall end product, not all the implementation details
Oh yeah, My client isn’t the most tech savvy person so I tend to stick to more broader terms that he’d understand like if I mentioned “react” or “react native” He’d just have no clue at all, But yes thank you I understand what you mean :)
Communicating tech stuff to non techies is a skill of its own
I've gotten pretty good at it trying to explain to my mum what the hell i'm doing all day lol
Oh my parents just purely see it as a bunch of words on a screen and will do no matter how much I try to explain it haha
Communicating what the different pros and cons of certain tech stacks are can still be valuable. If you communicate that you're using a popular and well tested tech stack that other people will also be able to understand and maintain, that can be a huge benefit and something he'd likely like to know
I was approached by a friend of my mum if i can do a website for her small business and i tried to explain all the different ways one could host a site and why i don't think it's the best idea for me to program her something bespoke, since any change she wants to make would have to go through a programmer
That’s why I started on a CMS site for this project, one I’ve gotten pretty used to but didn’t get too too far into is Glide
It was fun learning but I can see I’m making more progress doing it without CMS with all the restrictions it had through subscriptions it was a pain
I mostly use web tech to build desktop apps or game uis. Boy i'm glad i never had to touch a cms in my life so far
I wish I have never heard of the name Wordpress, installing that the first time made me almost rip some of my hair out
I used to program php as well. Glad i grew out of that
When communicating about the project to customers it's better to just start out with vague terms like "State of the art security" or stuff like thati wouldn't say "state of the art security" as it sounds bullshit to those who know, and sounds okay to those who don't it's better to say "i followed all the current best practices" or something more in those lines
I’ll admit state of the art security does sound a little silly lol
to me, it sounds like marketing bullshit written by someone who's there to push a product
you can expand a little on what i say, including on how you're following all the accessibility and security guidelines and other truths
it is important that you DO NOT LIE
Oh yeah definitely, I’ve been clear with him on how it’s been going the whole time
in the future, set roadmaps
I’ve just been sort of struggling on what to actually price the project specifically
how much time did you spend on it?
how many hours?
"40+ hours for months" isn't an answer
or "3-4 hours a day"
About 4 or 5 months I believe, I should have really noted down how many hours specifically
In the future I will, but it’s definitely taken a good chunk of my time
that is not an answer
you gotta know how much you spent
now, can you sell this to others?
That’s the aim, Yes
Well it’s not “others”
It’s just 1 person, my driving instructor
yeah, but can you sell it to others or not?
Yes, I’m going to sell it to him
that's not "others", that's the intended target
or whatever marketing calls it
can you sell this to other instructors?
I wasn’t planning on it, just my instructor more as work experience. He’s already said he’s happy to pay for the work I’ve done.
you can propose for him to allow you to sell it to others as well
That’s a good idea, yeah
he can pay less, and you sell it to more people
or, he pays for the exclusivity of the tool
and pays a bigger sum
I’ve already designed it to be more exclusive as like “his own app” or “his brand”
you can make it skinnable, and then you can sell it as a white label product with the branding of the other company
sticker shock is real, and if you go with a "this costs $10000", you might not be able to sell it
or the instructor wont be happy
and assuming he wanted to sell it to others, you can turn it around and say you will keep developing and give it support, for "free"
Yeah, I understand I can’t sell it as a 1 billion dollar etc etc
exactly
but you gotta be prepared
there's many ways to fillet this fish
Yeah, I’ll think about specifically how much time I’ve spent on it
if you don't know, or can't justify, that time didn't exist
but you may add a bit of padding at the end anyways