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How much should I charge??

December 13th, 2007 · No Comments · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Had a meeting tonight with a fellow I met at the holiday party on Tuesday. He has a client who wants to take an existing board game and convert it to a PC game (the client created the board game) using Torque to get it on multiple platforms. He actually asked me at the party if I used Torque and when I told him I’ve been toying with TGB since its inception he was very pleased. So we had a pleasant conversation over dinner tonight about the game and all it entails. This seems a better chance then the last two contract works that floated past me at least.

So the question now is how much money to charge for programming. I’ve never done contract work before so I’m not sure what to offer. A friend of mine said recently that contractors got paid $50-$200/hr. I was thinking of around $35-$50/hr but apparently they want to budget out the entire 6-8mo dev cycle. This triggered warning bells in my head, because I know that if I set $50/hr for a certain amount of hours in those months to calculate my total cost, I’m going to be losing money because I sure as hell won’t be working the same amount of hours towards the end of the project than at the start. So I’m prob going to bump it up to $75/hr to pad the coffers to allow for the inevitable overtime (which still hopefully doesn’t come).

Anyways those are just numbers. I could say $35/hr contract or $50/hr for a budget. Or $75/hr contract and $100/hr budget. But those last figures seem unreasonable given my background. I’m still thinking of shooting for between $35-$75 though.

What do you guys think?

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