"What is your rate?" and why I probably won't / can't give you a quote

attempts at an answer - ways to start the discussion

1. Without knowing how many hours the project will take, my rate is meaningless: $x X ? hours = $?.
2. If I'm interested in a project, I may do it for much less. If I'm not interested, my rate might as well be infinite.
3. Getting past the first payment is the hard part. Can you isolate one part of the project as the first benchmark of progress that makes you relatively happy to pay me? How much? Or give me a range as described below.
4. How sensitive are you to a $200 difference of opinion on the first bill? I once had a client go ape poop over that. (I tried to renegotiate, and he eventually started backing down, but by that time I decided he wasn't worth dealing with. I never got paid anything and made no effort to collect.)
5. Life's expenses are by the day and month, not the billable hour, so I'm more interested in consistent payments. Even if each payment is small, I want to be paid often. After several payments, when trust is established, we can do bigger payments less often for ease of logistics.
6. Do you have all the money on hand, or is the budget dependent on your income? I am very open to working a few hours a week for a much longer time.
7. Make me an offer. Qualify it however you want. "This probably seems really, really low, but you asked, so I'll ask: will you take $x per hour or this $y for this portion of the project or $z for the whole thing?" Sometimes people offer more than I would ask or exactly what I would ask.
8. What would you like to pay for the whole project if you could find competent Indian developers? (Good luck with that.)
9. What would you pay if you had to? In other words, give me several numbers and qualify each how you want.

quoting

Even for relatively small projects, a quote would take many hours to produce, so I can't afford (at this time) to give free quotes. Anyone who can afford a free quote is going to give you a large one--perhaps many times more than I would wind up doing it for. As for why it takes so long: for one, I almost always have to ask you lots of questions. Even well-written ads that demand quotes are almost never complete enough to even think about quoting, so I still have to ask lots of questions. Also, the response rate to CL ads is low. I won't consider quoting until I know you're real, and we have a path of communication.

If I did quote, I'd have to estimate way high. If you demand a quote, I have no sympathy for you if my hour count was actually a vast underestimate. That is, I'll happily take much more money than I would have if we had done things differently. A quote is an enormous risk, and one of us is probably going to pay for taking that risk.

My project management course professor worked for HP and Lucent. She told us that estimating is extremely difficult, a black art. She said that you had to relentlessly try to take into account all the factors. Then, when you think you're all done, double it.

Building software is not building a house. The variables involved in a house are trivially limited versus software. A builder can build dozens of houses and get better and better at estimating. Of the few dozen software projects I've done, they aren't similar enough to each other. Also, given how vast the technical field is, every project likely involves something new, and I have no way of knowing how long that learning curve will be. All I can do is give you ranges of how long various learning curves took in the past.

page history

1. 2021/08/28 8:06pm EDT - written over the last day. Preparing to post for the first time / create the page.