

Ask HN: Are we working for a silly hourly rate? - galaxyzen

Hello,
We are a small consultancy company base in Turkey as two developers, one mainly focusing on the front-end development and one for the backend. We are both CS graduates and we both have a few years of cooperate experience under our belts.<p>Lately, I was thinking if we are working for a very low hourly rate:<p>It's been about 10 months since we are working for a US based startup and in total, they pay us $5k per month.<p>If I make a calculation, say we both work for 10 hours per day for 20 days per month, it makes $12.5 per hour (we even work WAY more than that, it's like 15 hours, even weekends).<p>Also consider as a company we pay taxes (%20 of the income), rent (about $1k) yet life cost of Turkey is not cheap, probably about %25 lower than NY.<p>Please note that we are not developing some poor php script, it's a complex business model and we use modern tools that some of the successful US startups are using: Django, Backbone.js, postgreSQL, Redis, memcached, deploying to Amazon AWS and many others. In addition, we did many non-technical assistance such as fixing flaws in their business plan, written scripts for their video intro and several others.<p>I will be glad to hear your input.
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gexla
Nobody here can tell you where your rates should be. All the variables
involved are just too personal for anyone to be throwing around set numbers.
If you feel that you aren't where you would like to be, then raise your rates.

The biggest problem I see here is that you are working far too many hours to
be running your own business. If you are having to work 10+ hours per day and
weekends for your client, then you probably aren't spending time on the sorts
of things that would allow you to raise your rates (such as networking and
marketing.)

You guys need to cut your hours. If you are really working 50+ hours per week
then you are going to burn out and it's going to kill your business. That's in
addition to all the other things which are already stunting your business.
Also, you only get a certain number of productive hours per day as a developer
with no stake in the project you're working on. Any hours after that point are
half-assed hours. If that's not true right now, then it will be in the near
future.

Tell the client that you need to cut down the hours for each developer to
something under 40 / week. You guys need to have a life. If you absolutely
can't drop below your current work-load, then consider hiring or locating
another contractor. You should probably be attempting to pick up other
clients. The more clients you have, the more "luck surface area" you build. In
other words, the more contacts you make, the more opportunities pop up. New
opportunities are great for giving you new ideas, landing sweet gigs,
developing new skills and potentially opening up new business possibilities.

