MODx Rates

Hi

Me and a partner I’ve been doing web development freelance work with for a while are considering offering MODx development services. We’re wondering how much to charge, and of what form. It would either be a basic hourly rate or a per page fee (possibly a price for every template required and a price for every page using a template.)

What do you guys think is reasonable?

Thanks!

Discussing pricing is a bit tough, there are so many issues that would influence your rates such as experience, your location, the level of services you provide and the type of client you cater to. If you work with small personal sites the fee will be less than if you work with large corporate sites.

If you have been developing for a while I would stick to your current fee and go from there.

As for how to charge, I use an hourly rate as a base but find that most clients prefer to work on a project bassed fee since it is just easier to manage. So I will do an hourly estimate and wrap it up in a tight spec of deliverables and make it known that if it goes over you will charge the additional work in an hourly basis.

Hi

if required just to vote than I give +1 for hourly base especially when it’s an inovative project/task

Cheers!

Quote from: pehrlich at May 01, 2010, 09:21 PM

What do you guys think is reasonable?

A certified MODx guru charging $150/hour can probably get more done in a few hours than a less experienced person can in a couple of days but at much lower hourly rates. It’s sort a a "how long is a piece of string" question. Charge industry standard rates for your locale.

FWIW, for most projects, I prefer to work with project based fee - tight well-defined spec with the agreement that any additional work will be billed at an hourly rate. This allows the client to manage their finances like Shane said and gives me the freedom to just work without monitoring hours. But the project spec has to be very tightly defined.

For loosely laid out tasks I use an hourly base rate with a minimum fee.

it really depends on your qualifications. if you can do complex things on tight deadlines then you can probably chanrge higher than industry average. That’s what we do

Quote from: einsteinsboi at May 03, 2010, 09:50 AM

FWIW, for most projects, I prefer to work with project based fee - tight well-defined spec with the agreement that any additional work will be billed at an hourly rate. This allows the client to manage their finances like Shane said and gives me the freedom to just work without monitoring hours. But the project spec has to be very tightly defined.

For loosely laid out tasks I use an hourly base rate with a minimum fee.

For a recent project, I made the mistake of defining it tightly and well-defined, but then the client regularly had request like ’but can you ALSO do this... it’s only a small change’. And when I said I could do it, but it would cost a little more, they were telling me to be ’more flexible’!

Next time I will explicitly allocate a number of hours for this extra work in the estimate. The customer can then make use of these hours, and if he does not he does not pay for them of course. I’m thinking that could be a good system.

Also, it’s good to charge up front, e.g. 10% up to 25% depending on the financial risk.

Quote from: rthrash at May 03, 2010, 09:46 AM

A certified MODx guru charging $150/hour can probably get more done in a few hours than a less experienced person can in a couple of days but at much lower hourly rates. It’s sort a a "how long is a piece of string" question. Charge industry standard rates for your locale.

I may have missed something, but how does one become ’certified’? Or is that a manner of speaking?

There will be a MODx developer training and certification course/test coming in the future.

Oooh... that’s going to be interesting!


@topic: all we do is based on MODx, pretty much. We charge an hourly rate based on industry averages for our level-ish. Gotta note that we’re sort of "part time" webdesigners though, all of us are still in uni so fulltime’s quite tough then.