

Ask HN: Billing rate for contract work for a startup - throwaway8

I'm going to be doing contract work for a startup and I'm not sure what to charge. I have a personal interest in the project the startup is working on.<p>I will mostly be doing front-end web development, and I have 5-10 years experience in the relevant technologies (5 years doing it for money, before that just for fun). If it matters, I am in my mid 20s and located in the United States.<p>Any suggestions for what rate I should charge? I don't want to charge too much, since I really want to see this startup succeed. I don't want to charge too low because I need to pay my rent. This is my first time doing contact work, so any other tips would be appreciated as well.<p>Also, any links to other relevant HN threads would be helpful too.<p>Edit: I forgot to explicitly mention this, but numbers or number ranges would be extremely helpful. I'm really clueless on what to bill, so I need something to work off of.
======
whichdan
Think of how much you need to make, and how much you would get paid with a
full-time position. If the work is consistent and you can bill 30 hours a week
50 weeks a year, you need to base your income on 1500 hours a year. You also
need to consider that you won't get the benefits of being an actual employee,
which means as soon as the contract ends, you may need to look for more work
(i.e. you need to have money saved up) and you'll need to pay for health
insurance and your entire FICA by yourself. Also, it depends on your location
and how far you have to commute, if at all. Another factor is whether or not
you'll have stock in the company.

So, in this scenario, you could bill $50/hr and make a comfortable $75k/yr. If
the conditions are less than ideal, the contract is shorter, or you live right
in SF or NYC, you should certainly consider charging more.

Either way, unless you have stock in the company, regardless of whether you
want them to succeed, the only thing you're getting out of it is your
paycheck, so make it worthwhile!

~~~
robflynn
Another way to help calculate the price is: If you were doing this full time,
how much take-home post-tax money would you need? If you need $80,000/yr post-
taxes then $80/hr will get you pretty close after self employment, federal
(income, fica, medicare, ss, etc), and state taxes.

Granted, this calculates how much you'd NEED to charge to have X income, but
it does kind of help with the process of starting to determine a ballpark
figure.

------
petervandijck
Charge the same you normally charge, but tell them "I'll work 1 week for free
because I love you guys, but after that I'm gonna charge my normal rate".

Lowering your price is going to lead to bad feelings on both sides. Don't do
it.

------
barce
In this market, it's possible to charge around $125 or more in SF or NYC,
especially if it's Ruby. You can charge more for native apps / html 5 skills.
Cisco was hiring for an HTML 5 position at $200 / hour.

------
acak
In my experience, at Fortune 500 companies, front-end web developers are
billed at $60-90 (before tax) depending on the company, for your range of
experience.

