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Contractor pricing

3 points by rogeralan ↗ HN
We are thinking of hiring a contractor or elancer. Looking around the web, I see hourly rates from $20 to $250 per hour. I realize, it would depend on experience but how can elance.com contractors charge so little? What price range should I expect to pay for a contractor to work on UI and back-end work?

5 comments

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goodwink
For a competent full stack developer with a good reputation unless they are based in some very low cost area they will probably be charging upwards of $100-$150/hr.
samlev
The short answer is "You get what you pay for". There are plenty of 'cheap' contractors who get as many jobs as possible, churning out bad code that kind of does the job. Most of these will be "copy and paste code" style contractors who only write a little bit of relevant code to make it look "right".

I would, generally, avoid any short-term developer who's charging under $50/hour.

The other thing to note about elance, vworker, etc. is that there are a number of companies in very low-cost places (such as India, Pakistan, etc.) who will then re-distribute the work to their own employees. They tend to produce very low quality work, and there have been some horror stories about these types of developers using the job to insert nastiness into your site for their own ends (why hack a site to insert your malware when someone will give you access and pay you for it?)

YMMV. Treat them like any other person you want to employ and check them out before giving them much access or responsibility.

drKarl
Contractors from India or eastern Europe countries are way cheaper than the average hourly rate in the US.

In Spain, which is western Europe, but cheaper than other countries like UK, Germany or France, hourly rate for a freelancer can range from 15€ to 60€, being between 25€ and 35€ the most common pricing.

pdelgallego
You should check the Hacker News freelancer thread of this month [1].

I.e. I do front-end and back end development and my rate its around $45 per hour. Its probably on the cheap side, but I am trying to extend my customer network.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3537882

mattm
Some charge very little and then make it up by billing a large amount of hours. Whether this is due to malice or simply incompetence, it is difficult to say sometimes.