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Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by tptacek on Thursday November 01, 2012 @09:51AM (#4727465)
This is probably exactly the wrong way to think about your rate, as it hinges on "how much you want to make every month"; in other words, it's a cost-based price.

Your rate is set by the market, not by your "reasonable" desired salary is.

In case you're wondering at this point: I think you should be charging more than this tool says you should. And, obviously, I don't think you should be billing people by the hour at all.

Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by otakucode on Thursday November 01, 2012 @12:40PM (#4728382)
>Your rate is set by the market

It certainly ought not be. That your rate resembles the market is a CONSEQUENCE, not a driver. The driver of your rate needs to be based upon the value of your services. Are you going to enable a company to make $500,000 more next year? Then if they want to pay you $50/hr because it's 'market rate', you need to tell them to kiss your ass.

The presumption is that everyone is already doing this, and that everyone has a reasonably correct understanding of what the actual value of their work is. This is a false presumption, but it is a presumption which is absolutely necessary for any defense of capitalism. Knowledge of value has to be spread equally or all of the promises of capitalism fall apart. Anyhow, if everyone DID know what the value of their work was and set their prices by that, the idea is that a market rate would establish itself, which certainly would happen. What we've got today however is employers telling everyone to set their rates by the 'market rate' and ignore any other drivers... which makes it very easy to drive down the price over time. That would be why the average salary of the lower 90% of the economy has only risen 1% in the past 30 years, even though worker productivity and corporate earnings have skyrocketed.

Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by tptacek on Thursday November 01, 2012 @12:43PM (#4728401)
I don't really follow this, but I think we're in agreement that fundamentally your prices need to follow the value that your work generates; that value is orthogonal to what you feel you need to be making every month.

Cost-based prices are for gypsum and tile wax.

Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by dsmithn on Thursday November 01, 2012 @09:58AM (#4727507)
I look at it like, "here's how much I need to be able to charge per hour, what can I do to make my time worth that?"
Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by tptacek on Thursday November 01, 2012 @12:15PM (#4728247)
It's probably a mistake for most people to think about how much they "need to be able to charge", because you are going to be surprised at how much you can actually charge, and working your way back from a target rate will prevent you from discovering that.

I know people who started out expecting, optimistically, to be able to charge (say) $120/hr, and who just a couple years later are shocked to discover that they're worth multiples of that.

Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by yycom on Thursday November 01, 2012 @10:33AM (#4727692)
"Obviously" ... How?
Re:Your Rate - A better way to calculate your hourly freelan... by tptacek on Thursday November 01, 2012 @12:13PM (#4728241)
I've written more about not charging by the hour on HN than any other subject other than password hashes. Charge by the day.