
Ask HN: How many freelance programmers are there? - ahfarmer
Writing software that could help freelance programmers who bill hourly. Wondering if there are enough of us out there to justify my effort on the tool. Curious about the US and worldwide.
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brudgers
It's hard to see the value proposition of a bespoke freelance programmer
hourly billing application versus a general purpose book-keeping application
familiar to accountants, backed by regular support, and having been debugged
over many years of field deployment.

What makes your solution better than Quickbooks or GnuCash?

What percentage of the market for free-lancer programmers can a bespoke
product capture?

Why go through all the development effort of a book-keeping program and then
only target it at a very limited market?

Good luck.

~~~
ahfarmer
This tool is more of a timesheet creator than an invoice creator or billing
app. It uses your git history to create a timesheet (with guidance from the
user to make sure all the hours are correct).

One possibility is you could use my tool to create a timesheet and then import
that into Quickbooks. But the tool will also create a PDF invoice for you.

The tool has addressed a pain point for myself personally, but you're right -
it may be too niche to be worth putting out there. My market is 'programmers
who bill hourly and use git'. Maybe not that many people, and lots of those
people might be happy with how they track time already.

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danielvf
I've been freelancing for 15 years now. Sending invoices is by far my least
favorite work activity.

I have my own rails app that handles time tracking, and invoices. (Some
customers just log into the app, and pay their bills without my involvement.)
I spend about two hours a month on invoices.

~~~
ahfarmer
Me too - I hate sending invoices. Is your time tracking tool of the clock in /
clock out variety?

Also I'm curious - how do you collect payment? I usually only have one client
at a time paying large sums so I ask for a check in the mail. All the online
forms of collecting payment seem to take too much of a percentage.

~~~
danielvf
Yes, it's clock in, clock out. I do checks in the mail for 90% of work, billed
monthly, and Stripe and PayPal for smaller projects.

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1arity
I did a market sizing on "programmers" ( not just freelance ) about a year
ago, and came up with around 20 million worldwide. If you take the statistic
that 40% ( by 2020, or 35% today ) of US workforce is freelance and apply that
it would be around 8 million freelance programmers worldwide.

Perhaps a really cool way of doing this sizing would to use "authorship
attribution" techniques over webpage javascript to see how many "authors"
there were -- tho that could likely be way off as well. Seems like a
ridiculously involved way of calculating it tho.

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a3n
As many as there are pingpong balls in the schoolbus.

~~~
ahfarmer
haha. So 2.4 million? ; )
[https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/23jtom/how_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/23jtom/how_many_ping_pong_balls_will_fill_a_standard/)

Part of the reason I asked is that I work freelance, but all the other
programmers that I know are full-time employees. So in my small world it seems
like there are not that many of us.

~~~
a3n
I'm not particularly good at chasing business (I tried in a different field
for awhile). I like someone else to keep the lights on and find something for
me to do. Probably why a lot of other people don't freelance.

~~~
ahfarmer
Yeah, that's the tradeoff! I work freelance so that I can work part-time. I do
Monday through Wednesday for my client. Thursday is my long bike ride day, and
Friday is the day I write my own software. (And a lot of time on Sat/Sun as
well.)

I've found that it's pretty easy to get clients to agree to this if they know
& trust you (I always work with people that I know from my full-time career.)

------
pranavpiyush
One way of answering this question is to look at total number of service
providers on odesk, elance, fiverr, etc...

This article has some stats - [http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/welcome-to-the-
age-of-the-free...](http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-
freelancer/)

~~~
ahfarmer
Thanks! This is a great article for what I'm trying to figure out.

One thing I see in a lot of these articles is general reference to the term
'freelancer'. This seems to lump programmers in with writers, designers,
accountants, and anyone else who can work on a contract basis.

I wonder how many of the 1 million freelancer jobs posted on elance in 2012
were programmer jobs specifically?

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jefflinwood
I think that if you look at elance/odesk/upwork, you can actually rule out all
of those developers because they get paid through the upwork platform - they
wouldn't be sending invoices based on their git history. They might have other
clients that they invoice directly, but I wouldn't count on it.

~~~
ahfarmer
Good point. I think a lot of these sites do per-project pricing only.

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eds2015
What does your software do?

~~~
ahfarmer
Thanks for asking!

It creates a timesheet based on your git history, and then creates an invoice
from that. It guesses the number of hours you've worked an any given day, and
also shows you your work for that day and allows you to correct the estimate.

It used to take me an hour to create an invoice - now it takes about a minute.

It's not a huge savings - but for those like me who dread creating invoices it
makes me happy to get it done quicker.

Of course the tool is worthless unless you are a programmer checking all of
your work into git. I'm trying to find out if this thing could be useful to
people other than me.

~~~
zhte415
Guessing the number of hours could be difficult, as different people have
different workflow.

I don't freelance, but I do bill hourly for consultancy work. I just calculate
the number of hours in my calendar I've assigned, and work from that. It takes
minutes per month (and I know what I'm doing based on the calendar).

In some cases lawyers bill by the minute. I'm not sure they use a specialized
tool, and imagine it's more like an Excel sheet with time of call.

Sounds like an interesting technology, but limited not just to freelancers who
use Git, but freelancers who use Git and have a similar workflow you use (and
those that have a different workflow could raise hell regarding it not working
for them, especially as it's about how much they request to get paid).

I also doubt many billed clients would like to hear their billable time was
guessed or estimated.

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Firegarden
Freelancing for 15 years as well. 1999 was a great year! Sending invoices is
my favorite activity. "America is not a country, it's just a business. Now
fuckin pay me."

~~~
danieltillett
I hope that is not printed on your invoices :)

