Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

I recommend Weekly Rate Consulting[0]

About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed the first proposal.

You're probably worth more than you think.

Specialization can increase your rate, but business sense, communication, and ability to articulate and contribute value at the executive level is a 10x difference.

[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

> About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed the first proposal.

Doubling your rate is really only an option when you’re already charging too little or if you’re dealing with clients who have no idea what market rate actually is.

I encourage everyone to explore incrementally higher rates until they are losing deals over pricing. That’s the only way to really know the ceiling.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that higher rates bring higher expectations. I’ve had contractors who charges in the $100/hr range and delivered okay-but-not-great work with mediocre communication. We kept them on because they could deliver eventually and we felt like we got what we paid for. If they doubled their rates to $200 the first thing I’d do is wind down the contract and switch to any number of more diligent and qualified contractors I know who charge in that range.

As soon as you violate the client’s sense of “you get what you pay for”, the relationship is in trouble. If someone doubles their rates, they need to be prepared to deliver work and communication deserving of that rate. There are a number of contractors in my area who have reputations of charging expensive rates but delivering budget quality work. They’re mostly limited to new clients at smaller companies who don’t have enough of a network to check their reputation.

However, if you can increase rates and deliver quality work that matches the price, you could work yourself into a premium market segment. And that’s a good place to be!

You just highlighted why doubling the rates might work for many people. If you charge $100/hr, the client may simply assume you can't handle the higher level/harder work. If you potentially can.. then doubling the rate will make the client feel comfortable giving it to you.

The same pattern happens in salaried work, A manager needs to show that the expensive new senior hire was worth the money. So they give the new hire all the good projects and leave the (cheaper) current employees high and dry. Further, management is incentivized to show the new hire's work in a positive light during perf as they would be admitting that the manager made a mistake otherwise.

Understanding this dynamic will make you happier at work. Sometimes you need to leave so that you can be the great new hire, sometimes you need to demand more money/promotion so that management sees your worth. People inherently assume that you are worth something approximating your salary.

I generally bill around $175/hr to make whatever technology problems you have work out :) (Note I'm based out of Europe, though, reading some of the stuff here I should probably charge more anyways)

That's my generalized rate when the person paying me is non-technical and the actual work involved isn't clear or known to them ahead of time. I spend part of the time coming up with a plan so they know what's going to happen, of course, and coming up with estimates.

If it's a technical person or the problem is better-defined, then I charge different 'specialist' rates that vary based on the task and the rough 'market rate' for such a task.

Sometimes, also, it's just an unusually fun task or a task for a nonprofit or something, in which case I work with their budget and my intrinsic motivation and try to come up with something fair.

I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from the ground up your whole business from design, development, system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff as a single person.

My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.

This is a great rate. I’d love to know how you find clients willing to pay this amount. Most people I’ve come across that need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like $10,000…total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.

Simply put: Talk to people who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency (OP's selling point of being a "single person" means not dealing with a whole team, back&forth comms, etc). Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.

I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more towards weekly over time).

This doesn’t answer my question. How do you find people “who have more money and higher expectations, and highly value efficiency”?

> “Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to show up on google maps.”

The specific case I was referring to was a series seed funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years ago. They’ve since rebuilt everything in house and are doing very well now.

A tech seed round can easily be 7 figures these days. A new initiative at a non-tech fortune 50 could start in 8 figures. Hiring someone at 10k per week who can kickstart the project to working production system isn't a bad deal at these budgets.

Would you kindly share some examples of the types of people/orgs to seek out, then? For example, if not the barber shop, then the owner of a barber shop franchise, or owner of a chain of barber shops? Genuinely interwested in learning the archetypes of people to seek out here. Anything that you could share would be greatly appreciated!

Could you give some examples of those people?

Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.

$500k + benefits? Are you sure? Especially since you don't really know anything about the parent commenter (for example: their location)

Why's that? Large companies generally don't need single generalists; what they mostly have is teams of specialists, people who can get much deeper into a subject than a generalist can. Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive?

> Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive?

In my personal experience everything except infrastructure and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols, business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater need for generalists.

OP didn’t say they were good at competitive programming.

you seem to be on the low side, i do 4000p/day not less

I recommend that you double your rates -- you're worth more than you think.

I believe they're worth even more! Double it again!

I'm a cyber security specialist (in web application security) with a few certifications and 10+ years of experience.

I charge usually $350 an hour unless it's something I estimate will require the help of an outsider to which I may go as high at $1k an hour.

Answering everyone asking how we find clients - I love public speaking and so I try to do as much as I can. 80% of my clients saw me speak, the other 20% come from word to mouth. Highly recommend if you have the ability.

They can go anywhere from one hour (e.g awareness training) to a full month (e.g complex web application pentest)

I’ve seen some companies charge very little ($2-$5k) for a pen test. How are you able to charge $350/hour for essentially the same work? Is there some pitch or playbook you’re using to justify the price for doing the same work?

A $5K is pentest is just some guy running a couple of off-the-shelf, open source, or scriptkiddie tools and handing you the reports.

For $350/hr you get

- someone knowing which pentest tools to start with

- someone knowing how to follow up with more focused attention on problem areas and run additional tests

- someone analyzing the raw reports to understand the causes of the vulnerabilities

- a multi-page written formal report with interpretations and recommendations for mitigation, including a cost/risk/benefit summaries.

Edit to add: in my experience the companies offering cheap pentests and handing you the logs are the ones that then say, "If you want to understand these logs and know what to do about them, you can contract with us at $VERY_HIGH_RATE"

Ironically, I've found it's easier to charge higher rates for longer engagements.

Although I charge a flat fee, I've found that companies tend to be more accepting to my pricing when it's a longer engagement than a shorter one

Man. I (CISSP, CISA), 20 years of experience, everything from development to dev management to sales and marketing to finance to fundraising, the whole shebang, do ISO27001 ISMS’s and coach through certifications… for $70/hr. But then, my clients are based in the U.K., where technology is still generally seen as worthless.

You have to get out of Europe.

For whatever reason, Europeans just don’t seem to value software engineering and it shows.

Great engineers. Zero money to show for it.

That's what a (Master-level) plumber charges per hour in Germany. By offering such discounted rates, people consider you 'less valuable' a priori.

I have indeed heard anti-"IT" sentiments in the UK, where managers often come from outside disciplines (e.g. "politics, philosophy and economics" type of oxbridge degrees). Some of these people adjust quickly and pick up technical skills naturally, whereas others couldn't insert a 9 V block battery into a toy without a YouTube video after a decade of "IT" exposure. But they also do not know what something is worth without a clear explanation, so your value is bound by your ability to articulate it.

Sounds like it is less technical correct? I find that there are a lot of auditing firms out there willing to do compliance work for cheap therefor bringing down the prices (still not super low).

Technical auditing and training in cyber security was always a kind of niche that allows you to charge more.

No, I typically end up filling the roles of CTO, CISO - I can advise, implement, whatever, on virtually any stack.

It’s just that in the U.K., technology skills have little to no value.

Have an annual salary in mind for a similar role, chop off the last three zeros, and that's my hourly rate.

It works out to approximately double which is just enough to account for things you would normally get from an employer:

- payroll taxes (SS/Medicare) - PTO/sick days - equipment & supplies - training/conferences - health insurance - retirement savings

Yes! Long ago I read a book that mentioned that freelance professionals (accountants, lawyers, etc) tended to bill around 1000 hours per year. That the unbillable time went toward sales, client relations, marketing, learning, etc. I could usually do a little better than a 50% utilization rate for myself, but as you say that money goes to things most people don't have to pay. So the knock-three-zeros-off-salary rule served me well.

Generalist can be a specialization in itself. Imagine someone that can do a bit of front-end, backend, infra, design, would be a specialist in bootstrapping a startup.

Don't get too attached to market/industry defined roles.

Another way to raise rates is to take risks (like deadlines, promises) but every person had their own risk profile.

Excluding design this is me and what I enjoy doing.

I named my operation "engine ignite" because I like helping startups start.

I LOVE getting folks leveled up on team process and procedure to support SOC2 and such.

Or change the language. Instead of 'generalist', sell yourself as a senior developer, architect, lead developer, etc. Nobody asks "what programming language are you an architect in", because the job is supposed to be much broader than that.

In Amsterdam NL a backend engineer could expect 80-100 euros/hr. > 100 is also possible, but you may get into specialization territory.

Also based in NL, "Amsterdam" area (Utrecht). As people have mentioned elsewhere, it depends. My current long-term (6+ months) contract is at €95/hr, working as part of a great team of developers on an Elixir backend, and being able to learn Elixir (which I didn't know beforehand) on the job. I have also done smaller projects (2 months), a bit more specialized, on the side for €125/hr.

By the way, I am not totally convinced about weekly vs hourly billing. In my case, hourly billing has worked well. I just make sure I bill for _everything_ I do for the client, also the time I spend learning stuff, and communicate clearly about it. People hire me because I can figure out stuff quickly, not because I know all there is to know about programming (though I do think I have a strong background).

Yeah, hourly billing gets knocks, but I think it's the right approach for a lot of circumstances. If I can control the shape of the engagement and it's the kind of thing I've done enough that I can reliably predict the work needed, sure, project pricing is great. But if you're just putting in work on a project somebody else is leading, hourly's the way to go, because that insulates you from all sorts of risks.

Where would one go and look for those kind of vacancies?

You either connect to a freelance broker or you network your way into such things.

In my experience no advertises on job boards that they are looking for contractors.

I'm from South Asia. I offer end to end web development, SEO and digital marketing. I charge $50/hr.

12,500 / week for general work (design, prototyping, sometimes building). Startups won't pay this, but large firms will.

$2k per day.

hourly always invites discussions, for example how are phone calls with mixed topics billed?

I'm considering switching from hourly to a daily model.

Tracking hours is becoming too granular for the work I'm doing. This includes research and development; each of which I find myself "guessing" the hours a lot of the time.

In my case, it was the research.

If you bill 2h of DuckDuck-ing for suitable libraries to use as dependencies, that sounds like you're slacking off. But it'll probably save money for the project as a whole.

I’m not sure if I qualify as generalist, but this should still be relevant:

It depends. Did I go through an agency, or find the client myself? Do they need _me_ or a butt in a seat? Will the work be fun, or awful, or is there any on-call expectation (which is worse than awful and probably a hard no)? Discounts for bulk and prepayment.

Also, hourly rates are the worst. Value pricing is a hard leap; a much easier thing you can do today is at least bump to a flat day rate, or a weekly one of the shape of your clients makes it seamless. Just do it; it’ll make you a happier, saner person and immediately mitigate a terrible incentive misalignment.

I think incentives are misaligned either way. You have to match the structure to the situation.

I have a friend, a great sydadmin/devops/infrastructure person. He never takes full-time jobs; his deal is always for 32 hours/week. His reasoning? 32 hours is 32 hours, but full time is all the time. He leads a much happier life than most ops-ish people I know.

Maybe you have the sort of clients where day/weekly rates work. But for the sort of client that has crunch mode or deadline rushes, there is no way in the world I'd give them a weekly rate. If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out in time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want them to feel the pain when they see the bills.

I charge 75 EUR per hour but my main client is very loyal (15 years working together), pays on time (24 hours) and I might soon become a business partner.

I de design, backend in PHP test and do server administration of a PMS for hotel.

In Germany - 100€/hour. Billing on average 150 hours each month.

£500pd this was 4 years ago though. Decent rate at the time.

Southeast USA. $100/hr for everything (meetings, development work, bug fixes, ...).

Took me a while to be honest with myself and finally charge for all of my time. Maybe it's confidence?

Never had an issue from a client with this arrangement.

You should probably charge more. Automobile repairs techs in Alabama charge more than that.

But I’d like to know where you find work because I haven’t found many clients in the SE that wish to spend money.

> Automobile repairs techs

Is that a different term for "mechanics"?

In the repair industry, technician is reserved for folks that can properly diagnose and make any and all repairs.

A mechanic is someone who can throw parts at a car but isn’t likely to be able to perform in-depth diagnostics or advanced repairs especially on newer cars with complex electrical systems.

A mechanic in Alabama should expect to earn $50k-$60k while a tech is closer to $110k or so.

I know at least 9 guys in my county who never finished high school and couldn’t compose a proper sentence if their lives depended on it yet they earn $150k+ per year repairing automobiles.

Yeah. Mechanics charge 50, automobile repairs tech charge 100.

Repairing an automobile is a more difficult and valuable skill set, however.

Absolutely and the tools required often cost far more than a developer will ever spend during the course of their career.

But $100 per hour is too cheap. I charged more than that for carpentry repairs to homes and commercial buildings.

The local PepBoys charges $122 per hour and they’re aren’t capable of much more than oil changes and tire repairs.

I tell clients that identifying the problem is at least 50% of the work, and that includes meetings. Well, I call them "work sessions", and I don't think it's an euphemism.

And then they can pay 100 hours for a narrow scope of perfect, or they can pay 20 hours and iterate until it's good enough (bugfixes).

Is it controversial that meetings should count as billable time? I mean, it’s not like you’re there because you just really like meetings!

We bill for project management and work related meetings, but not contract and business development related meetings. So if we’re getting feedback for our performance, ways we can improve, or discussing a contract extension we don’t bill for those. But if we’re discussing the thing we’re building, or doing project status updates we bill for that.

We’ve never had a client push back on that.

I bill double for meetings. Suddenly was invited to a lot less meetings that I never needed to be in as a contractor. Perfection.

This is genius and I wish I had read this comment a long time ago.

Meetings before signing a contract are usually free. Mean people call them "exploiting freelancers". They would invite consultants to their office and try to pickup their brains. They usually asking for free estimation, or some other free work, in the best (and very rare) case they will ask your rate and shake the hands right at the first meeting.

There are very few people who would agree to pay even for the initial meeting.

After signing the contract, you can bill for all the time you spent working, meeting, thinking, answering emails or phone calls, or even being on standby or warming up a seat at a client site.

In case the client set up a meeting and then canceled it on the short notice, or worse, didn't show up at all - you can also charge for this if you've lost the opportunity to work on other things.

Of course it's best to discuss this with the customer before signing the contract, and if possible made it clear in the contract itself.

I charge $150/hr. for new work and do pretty much exclusively hourly-based work. I have many clients that I grandfather on lower rates.

The second half of this equation is how many billable hours you can get as freelancer in a week. Plenty of the things I do are not billable, and the more different small contracts I'm working on the less billable hours I'm able to fit in. I would say I average 20-25 hours billable on a regular work week of 40-ish hours.

$150/hr for small (<= 10 hour) projects but I did lower my upwork to $90 before the pandemic to try and see if it got me any inbound leads (it did not).

$4000/week with no Fridays for bigger contracts.

It usually gets negotiated down for startups and non-profits.

I’m also curious what’s a good way finding projects for generalists. My contracting experience was that I ended up doing specialized work even though I would able to complete the project from start to finish.

In Canada, $80/hr. Aiming for $90 for my next contract starting next month. Or to move to the US and make way more, apparently.

$120US for work I think will be interesting or rewarding, scaling to $300US for work that sounds like it's going to suck.

I have 12 years of experience working as a backend engineer full time for medium-to-large sized software companies, and breaking into consulting has always seemed really difficult to me.

I mostly excel at system architecture and writing technical documents to describe the trade offs of those systems. I really don’t enjoy full stack/web programming or marketing - is it possible to consult in strictly this capacity? e.g. as a principal or higher level engineer?

I don't know about doing it on your own, but you could certainly join a consulting firm and do that role alongside a team of more junior people.

in the uk, everyone wants to work on daily rates. 600pd-650pd as a devops engineer.

So, £75, or $86 an hour. This is 5 days a week, 40 hours a week. I bill around £14k a month and after taxes i walk away with about £7k a month.

> I bill around £14k a month and after taxes i walk away with about £7k a month.

You should employ some sort of a tax-reduction strategy. Paying 50% of your gross in direct taxes is absolutely batshit crazy.

I used to contract for £350-450 per day as a PHP backend dev and paid an effective 30% tax rate. Which is still crazy insane high, but it's not 50%.

Does your 50% figure includes VAT? Because if that's not VAT inclusive, you're doing something horribly wrong. Inside IR35?

If that's net after pension and everything it's not really that surprising. In Finland for example the employee pension rate is 25% of gross. Then tax and employer insurance on top of that and you're left with about half of the total paid sum. Of course, as independent contractor you can set your own pension rate as low as you want but that's a different debate.

Virtually all contractors in the UK are operating through a LLC and paying themselves in dividends, so there's no pension at all, and legally they are not even employees of their businesses (because board members can provide the business with whatever services without being employees).

If you go through PAYE, you make yourself an employee, and you must pay yourself a pension. But going through PAYE is a net loss, because then you also have to pay national insurance not only on your side, but also on the employers' side. Paying NI if you can perfectly legally avoid paying it is stupid.

I have a 'rack rate' which is for anything short. That comes down for larger projects - say 10% for 500 hours, 15% for 1000 hours and so on.

95/hr, doing "web stuff" for small businesses

OOC, do you have a link to the question from a couple of days ago?

About 100 dollars/hour, depending on the client

I’m “full stack”, also experienced with C++ and various other stuff

Mine is 40$/hourly as a Fullstack JS developer (React + Node)

Keep in mind that contractors don't receive benefits (health care, dental, etc) and have to pay about 30% in taxes. So in reality, the pay is about equal once you factor in that.

I live in Canada & I've done the spreadsheet math. I can probably ~triple my salary if I go balls to the walls. Insurance is a drop in the bucket (I can just outright buy my drugs). I'm just kinda comfy where I'm at, and I'm having fun at my job.

Fang is for comfortable and reliable cash, not for the highest possible salary at the highest possible stress level.