When you're charging for work like this, you aren't just charging for the 30 seconds it takes to fix it - you're charging for the years of experience that enable you to do it, plus the 30 seconds it takes to actually do it.
To put it in strictly economical terms, it would have taken the client more than $120 worth of her time to develop the expertise necessary to fix the problem. Thus, paying $120 for the fix - no matter no long it actually takes - is worth it for her.
Not only that, the sale had more than 30 seconds of overhead. It may be 30 seconds of actual work, but the $120 includes soliciting the sale, invoicing the client, communication, transferring credentials, etc. There's no such thing as 30 seconds worth of work.
I used to do this sort of work in high school. I got to know a bunch of bugs in IE and when people were having trouble I'd help them for money. There were times when I'd net over $100/hour, but they were few and far between.
Right. Back in the day a friend and I got paid to crack a pediatrician's Xenix-based billing system (at the pediatrician's request). He'd forgotten the admin password.
We basically just fired up some crack scripts and let them run, then charged him (what we thought was) a lot of money.
Only later did I realize why he was so happy with the deal, and seemed to think he'd gotten a bargain -- without the admin password he couldn't generate any bills.
I would wager that the amount of receivables in the system exceeded what we charged by at least one order of magnitude, maybe two.
The title is completely inaccurate and misleading. He made $120 for what he says is 30 seconds of work. It's more like 3-5 minutes if you include communications back and forth with the client, connecting to the server, looking around etc.
Yeah, I'm not the original author of this post, so I submitted this to HN to see what the community's feedback might be. Though I like his points about pricing for the value of the product rather than hourly time, it appears that HN doesn't like this specific example.
"it appears that HN doesn't like this specific example."
Perhaps because they are focusing on the linkbait title rather than the message (which is often repeated). Stop worrying about thinking you are ripping people off because something is so simple for you to do and put your efforts into providing value to someone who doesn't know what you know.
The only reason you can charge for what you know is that you did something before or spent time learning it. You know something that someone else doesn't know. I've had wordpress problems and would easily pay $120 to avoid hours worth of research and work (unless as sometimes I enjoy the challenge and have the time to do that work but that's not business it's technotainment I guess.)
I appreciate the lesson in this post. I suffer from the same kind of 'guilt' myself, most of my freelance income right now comes from tweaking wordpress or javascript for Business Catalyst sites. It's easy to underestimate the value ones' own expertise in an area where that expertise, in the field at large, may not be very sexy or when you're dealing with non-technical clients who balk at paying more per hour than they would someone to cut their lawn, but just want their website to work.
And yet I've been told by other more seasoned pros that I should be charging three times what I am. It's kind of ridiculous how people can shortchange themselves.
To put it in strictly economical terms, it would have taken the client more than $120 worth of her time to develop the expertise necessary to fix the problem. Thus, paying $120 for the fix - no matter no long it actually takes - is worth it for her.