Thank you all for the good advice. I think in my heart I knew some of this (as far as working hourly), but have made the rookie mistake of underbidding to get the contract. I feel bad about it because it makes things worse for everyone if too many contractors do this. If they had been paying the hourly rate in my profile, they would have gotten 11 hours from me. So far I've put in perhaps 100 hours.

I am going to try to move up to the $3000-5000 range and I want to be prepared, because if I find myself in a hole there, it will be 10x harder to dig myself out.

It would be nice if we had a resource like "pitfalls to avoid as a contractor" with some real life examples that would tend to only be learned through experience. For example, I had no idea that GUI programming was so time consuming. I had basically written it off as being "just design" so I didn't take it seriously.

But it's sort of like painting a house, the real work is in prep, stripping, priming, cleanup, buying tools and brushes, training, just on and on. The actual painting only takes a few hours. I think that's why people scoff at the idea that painting a house costs thousands of dollars.

That's how this project has been for me, so I'd love to hear more insights like that.