Posts from November 2010
When I penned down some simple thoughts on the way I work with a single client, I didn't expect the flurry of activity that followed it. 150,000 visitors from all over the world, more than 350 comments here, on reddit and on Hacker News. I probably hit a very sensitive nerve of the developer community. I'll try in this post to sum up the various comments and perhaps clarify some of my original points.
I was recently contacted by my first Greek potential client, wanting to do some new features in a small Django application. I quoted him my hourly rate and he was shocked! He wanted me to quote a fixed price for the features he wanted, and I strongly declined. The outcome?
We ended up working together, he is very pleased with both the results and the money he's paying, and I didn't budge on my initial quote. Here are the arguments I used to support that an hourly rate is better for everyone. Hopefully they will help somebody else as well.