What would you charge?

Hey guys, I am new to this community but definitely not new to web development or cms. I am trying to work on giving bids for projects and was wondering what you guys would charge to create sites similar to a few examples (created for MODx of course). Keep in mind that each one would have different types of content creators/managers that need to be able to easily add content and pages, also donations and advertising on the site.

http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/

http://www.takethewalk.net/

http://mannafoodbank.org/

http://standnow.org/

http://www.twloha.com/

Rough estimates and a project duration assuming you are starting from scratch. Thanks so much!

Aaron

Even though I don’t necessarily agree with you asking for estimates on the forum, I’ll ask a few questions - are you quoting as a freelancer, or a registered and practiced company? I think once you have that established, you can start quoting on what you are doing work "as."

Just remember, many of the users on the forum are very well versed in MODx and the languages surrounding it, so estimating off of an extremely experienced person may not be your best option.

Estimate the time it will take you x cost per hour, add a couple of hours for glitches

Quote from: texoweb at Sep 20, 2010, 12:51 PM

Even though I don’t necessarily agree with you asking for estimates on the forum, I’ll ask a few questions - are you quoting as a freelancer, or a registered and practiced company? I think once you have that established, you can start quoting on what you are doing work "as."

Just remember, many of the users on the forum are very well versed in MODx and the languages surrounding it, so estimating off of an extremely experienced person may not be your best option.

Well I do have my own registered business and I have my own process of creating estimates. I was just curious what the variety of costs points would be for the examples above. Typically when you put a bid on a project you don’t get to see what the other bids are. Thought the results may be interesting.

I usually ask the person that asked for the bid what was the range of
quotes they received, to see if I am in the ballpark or I am over pricing or under pricing.
In the last one I participated and lost, the quotes ranged from $500USD to $8000USD!!

So it is really hard to compare pricing just like this. As others have mentioned, it
depends on how you price as, what you give to the customer, what kind of process do you
follow and what kind of service and value added stuff...

Best thing is to price for your time, write an awesome proposal and hope for the best!!

Quote from: charliez at Sep 20, 2010, 04:35 PM

I usually ask the person that asked for the bid what was the range of
quotes they received, to see if I am in the ballpark or I am over pricing or under pricing.
In the last one I participated and lost, the quotes ranged from $500USD to $8000USD!!

So it is really hard to compare pricing just like this. As others have mentioned, it
depends on how you price as, what you give to the customer, what kind of process do you
follow and what kind of service and value added stuff...

Best thing is to price for your time, write an awesome proposal and hope for the best!!

This seems to be what I have seen in the few instances I was able to learn the bid range. I recently lost a bid for a site where my price was $4000USD and the winning bid I learned was for $800 with a $99/month charge for hosting and maintenance. I checked the site once it was up, totally sub-par, hopefully they are happy. Its hard and maybe not even worth it to try and teach the importance of standards and other such techniques to ever prospective client in a proposal.

Quote from: tehaaron at Sep 20, 2010, 09:20 PM

This seems to be what I have seen in the few instances I was able to learn the bid range. I recently lost a bid for a site where my price was $4000USD and the winning bid I learned was for $800 with a $99/month charge for hosting and maintenance. I checked the site once it was up, totally sub-par, hopefully they are happy. Its hard and maybe not even worth it to try and teach the importance of standards and other such techniques to ever prospective client in a proposal.

There’s a lesson there, though. If you can assess the user’s likelihood of wanting changes, it’s often a better deal for you to give away the razor and make money on the blades. Almost all home security system companies work this way. They lose money on the install, but do quite well over the years once they have a captive "user."

You can have some clients with "brochure" sites that pay a very small fee (or nothing at all) for the site but pay $300-$500/year for domain service and maintenance and use up about 2 hours/year of your time. You can always renegotiate if they make frequent changes. For more demanding clients, you can still do well by under-pricing the site and charging a solid hourly rate for changes. This works especially well for clients who don’t have an existing web site, or who have a crappy one they, or a family member, built and have realized that they need a professionally designed site.