When you code HTML/CSS...

somehow i doubt mcdick's pays $12 to their minimum wage staff. the demand for fast food workers can't possibly be that bad.

heh, in calgary, yeah, it is that bad. our unemployment rate is ~2.5%, the lowest in canada. the biggest holdback in business growth is lack of people in all markets now, which give the employee the upper hand on dictating wages.

come to think of it, i read something about that last summer. took a minute to click in it's the same place.

So I take it a lot of you are into just plain out quoting people, I assume that you include all overhead and extra costs?

I can't really think of any coding overhead costs besides software that you use. Does anyone include a software portion into their quotes?

sure, if the job requires new software. or even old software. I mean software purchases don't pay for themselves. and its hard to 'justify' and extra $800 dollars for a one off contract to a client, where I get to keep the software.

travel costs can be a factor, work space, sub contracting. also, things i consider are the time frame the contract is to be done in. rush jobs cost more cause i have to drop the priority of other contracts to focus on the current one. long term contracts can spread the cost over time, appearing to cost less, but still covering your overhead and cost.

there are lots of factors, of course you can simplify and hopefully your coming out on top.

Originally Posted by Jeff Andersen So I take it a lot of you are into just plain out quoting people, I assume that you include all overhead and extra costs? I can't really think of any coding overhead costs besides software that you use. Does anyone include a software portion into their quotes?

Overheads make up a large portion of my quotes. They cover things such as:

Electricity
Phone charges
Internet charges
A small amount is coded to software
Stationery
Travel (if needed)
Rent/mortgage (you have to factor this in, unless you are living somewhere for free)

Try to think of anything that you might use during a project and factor a cost in for it.

I charge 75$ first page, 25$ after.

If I was to offer hourly, it would be around 25$. Since it takes around 3-4 hours to do it right, and efficiently and to make it as fast as possible.

I could finish at around 2-3 but why not give them the benefit?

Nice to see you coding again Jeff.

Hi Jeff,
Its very good experience to learn how the freelancers are charging on hourly basis.Its quite interesting.When we post some projects on freelance market place, those who dont know the exact hourly rate or the project cost will get into trouble.Your query clears many doubts,its very much useful for other webmasters. What do you think about other low cost IT professionals who render their services at lower side at expected quality and delivers intime. Though they are charging very less amount they do deliver good job.Am i right or wrong?

When it comes to charging for my services as a front-end developer I always charge a daily rate. I've never heard of anyone charging an hourly rate in this business. I'm from the UK, so maybe it's just the way we do things here. My daily rate on average is £120, that's about $236.50, for this type of work.

When it comes to semantic XHTML/CSS design I have to agree with most of what's been said here. But... Images have their place in XHTML for displaying images, as do tables for tabular data. I've seen a lot of developers completely strip everything out of the XHTML page unnecessarily. For example header, bold, italics, and even paragraph tags, just so they can later define them again in the CSS file. Get a grip people, you've taken it too far! Tags have their purpose.

I also agree with Julian that you have to build overheads in to your rates. One thing that Julian missed is including something for the days that we don't work. Being freelance we can't possibly work every day so we have to make up for this. All things accounted for, this is why our daily rate is higher than a full time member of staff.

True vkess, I don't include leave provisions in overheads, they are normally a percentage of my hourly rate. 10% of income is equivalent to 5 weeks leave.