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Ask HN: Is $300/HR too low these days for custom full stack?

21 points by noduerme ↗ HN
Background. I'm a solo dev. I used to just bid contract jobs at around 25% less than where I used to work. So back in 2008 I would bid $75k to go solo on a job I knew my former employer would charge $100k for. I switched to an hourly rate around 2012 because I was tired of re-negotiating over every new feature (or what constituted a feature). At that point I just did an estimate, backwards from my job rate, and settled on $75/hr. Since then I've increased to $300/hr.

But even back then, in 2012, I knew freelance consultants who specialized in something like Salesforce setups, who would come into someone's office and charge $450/hr to be there.

Is $300/hr stupidly cheap now? I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand.

I'd like to hear from anyone in a similar position.

16 comments

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mujib77
Honestly if people are still willing to pay $300/hr consistently, you’re probably doing something right

Most clients care more about results/reliability than whether every line was typed by hand.

bruce511
>> I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand.

Spoken like someone who charges by the hour.... you are incentivised to do things the slowest possible way...

Now, of course, slow might be better, or fast might be better, but you frame fast as "cheating" not as "inferior"... which is ... interesting..

austin-cheney
I would never pay by the hour for LLM output. The expectation there is two-fold:

1. If LLMs are doing the work then why pay a consultant at all in the first place.

2. Secondly, I would expect the LLM output to cost just as much, or more, because it would require deeper code inspection and more thorough test automation cases. In my manually written code the test automation cases are there to account for future regression where in the LLM code the test cases to there to identify bounds checks against the requirements.

noduerme
My goal isn't to max out hours but to keep clients coming back and get the work done so I can move on to the next thing.

Having LLMs write production code for clients presents a lot of extra risk for me in maintaining those codebases in the future. Writing it myself, I know exactly how every stitch of it works, how the logic is delegated, and where everything lives. With LLM-written code for something large and complex, you practically need an LLM to debug it. With my own code, if a bug crops up, I can reliably guess which file and which function out of hundreds is causing the issue.

One thing I don't charge for is fixing bugs once software is delivered. So by avoiding LLM-generated code, I feel I limit my exposure to poring over files I may have only read once, didn't write, and feel less confident in understanding the implications of any changes I make.

Lionga
Over 20 years of experience in full stack and mobile here. I'll do it for $200/hr and even use LLMs where useful so half the time is needed.

Unless you are a very well known expert in a certain niche, who the hell is paying $400/hr?

taurath
Plenty of places for whom the solution is worth far and away more money than the hourly to build it.
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owebmaster
Do you have demand for 8h/day, 5days/week?
launchseed
Buyer side perspective: i'm 18, shipped a product this year. the rate was never what i was looking at. it was whether the person could tell me what something would cost before they built it. a dev who scopes accurately at $300/hr beats one at $150/hr who doesn't every time. the llm thing is a separate question. the code either holds up or it doesn't, how it got there is a methods question not a morality one.
noduerme
This is a thoughtful answer. I'm usually asked to ballpark estimate a project before starting, and of course I've already sketched it and scoped it by that point. So I usually give an estimate that includes some cushion for areas that might present more difficulty, or if I see the client is a little fuzzy on some functionality that might need a deeper dive once we get there. Then my hours usually come in 15-20% lower than the estimate, if there aren't a lot of additional demands. And usually if there's something extra a client requires, I can think of a cheaper/faster way or a more polished/complete way to accomplish it. This makes clients happy and saves me time. But absolutely, I try to overestimate a bit so as to never blow past the client's budget.
maryamshafaqat
$300/hr does not sound cheap for coding it sounds cheap if clients are paying for deep experience reliability and business understanding on top of the code.
del-catta
With LLMs, if you use them well, you don't just get faster. You also get better test coverage and more reliable code. So you end up delivering more for the same hours (Alex Hormozi defines this really well, worth a read). $300/hr penalizes you for all of that. I switched to project-based, $8-12K per build, because a dashboard delivered in 2 weeks is worth more than one delivered in 8