How much should I charge to code projects?

You asked me this right after I finished writing up an answer to someone on another forum, whose friend wanted to bring him in on a project, and he wanted to know how much to charge. Just like here, a lot of people were just advising him to multiply by his hourly rate — which is a decent start, but only a start. What I wrote to him, and saved in a text file for just such an occasion, was: I don't think this is realistic to ask for an estimate on, without a lot more info on you, your cow-orker, the client (starting with whether he […] tends to be reasonable), y'all's skills in the techs involved, etc. etc. etc. My advice would be, don't bill this on an hourly basis, unless the work is very poorly defined (in which case defining it is part of coming up with the quote), or the client has a history of changing his mind. Instead, if you can get an agreement to well defined work, that the client will accept: Make as realistic as possible an assessment of the time it would take you. Add whatever padding you like, Just In Case. Multiply by your desired hourly rate. This result is the absolute minimum you should charge. Now comes the much trickier, but much more profitable part. Interview the client and get as realistic as possible an assessment of what this will do for his business. What's the actual business objective he's trying to achieve? How does he believe that this work will contribute towards that? Do you think that will work? How confident are you in that? How can the goal be measured, and any effects of this work isolated from other causes? Can you make him a guarantee that this work will cause an X Next, what percentage of the effect on the business's bottom line, how far into the future, do you and your buddy feel is justified to grab for yourselves? This should be no more than 50 Multiply by the bottom-line delta you are pretty sure will happen. This is the ceiling of how much you should charge. For instance, if you feel justified in asking for at most 10 If the ceiling is lower than the floor, just walk away. It's not worth enough to him, to pay you enough, to be worth it to you. Otherwise, find some figure between the two. Closer to the floor means leaving money on the table. Closer to the ceiling means more risk of the client walking away due to sticker shock.