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Ask HN: Where to get $4-5k per week django gigs?

14 points by throwaway011001 ↗ HN
I became a very competent Django developer in the last two years because I wanted to earn $10-20k per month to save up enough to bootstrap a web business.

I've been working all the time for clients but they all have low budgets and are cheap. How can I break into the $100-$150 per hour Django market?

11 comments

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[dead] PythonDeveloper
The best way to raise your rates is (a) expose yourself to more opportunities, and (b) stop taking lower paying gigs.

As you get more gigs, and more referrals, you raise your rate with each gig, even if it's $5/hour. Over the course of 20 gigs, you may well be in the $100-$150 hour range, and have a collection of happy clients willing to do the selling for you.

shire
what is your hourly pay at the moment? and how did you become a Django ninja? want to follow the same route lol
throwaway011001
Just recently I have put a hard floor at $50 per hour, but its hard to get people to accept $50 per hour when I can't give an exact time frame for all of their wants to be met.

They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this.

It's not as easy a road as I thought it would be. My flat rate projects always ended up taking longer because of client demands and so my hourly actual pay went way down.

I got good with Django by building things and doing a lot of googling whenever I ran into problems or needed to do something new.

I had a basic computer programming background before this though.

rtpg
>They try to push for a flat rate, but I won't anymore because I have been burned many times by this.

Honestly if you're doing contracting then having a well defined contract should make this irrelevant. The burden of figuring out how long is on you, not them.

meric
I've had good experiences with something like "$90 first 30 hours, $60 thereafter". You have incentive to finish work fast because you want to start new projects to get the higher hourly rate, at the same time, the tail hourly rate means they won't be changing requirements too much.

When you must estimate a timeframe, make a honest estimate, and multiply it by 4.

phaus
I've heard it repeated quite often on HN, that if you want to make 100s of dollars per hour, you need to bid on projects instead of charging an hourly rate. The idea is that many people will spend x amount of money on a project without a second thought, where x will equal $200-500/hour when you figure out how long the project will take you to complete, but if you ask for an hourly rate that's three figures, they will generally turn you down.

I'm just a network security guy with aspirations of becoming a developer some day, but from my observation that seems to be the accepted theory with freelancers on HN.

1123581321
Please understand I am writing this kindly -- the issue is that you are not an experienced enough freelancer.

You can compensate for this if you have the marketing and client management skills to get an aspirational rate, but if you don't, you need to be so good that you not only can see your way through a project in a conversation but see the potential traps and talk through them with the client confidently.

I believe that you can get this experience quickly -- good luck!

greatmints
I would recommend selling more value and not just the technology. What value do you bring to the table for a company to warrant them investing $150/hour for your work?

There are others with possibly more completed projects, clients, time under their belt with more developers, if they are a company, what value do you offer that they cannot provide for less?

Go for bigger clients with bigger budgets, government projects would be a good place to start. Just make sure you have your business setup correctly along with a website, list of services and value you are providing using Django and that you meet a companies prerequisites (Incorporated, LLC, insured, mailing address, phone number, business bank account, etc.).

Ask yourself what value can you bring to the company that will make them want to pay you the higher rate. Once you answer that question and can back it up you will get the rates you are looking for.

kp27
patio11, read his comments/blog
hedonist
In your position, I would consider getting past my resistance to fixed time frames. Yes, people can pile on extra requirements but there are ways to manage this -- first by strong communication, and then just mentally figuring in some buffer time (1.5x up to 4x like some people have said) in drawing your original estimate. Also, you can start iterating in smaller-scale projects and iterate gradually up from there. You can also ask for intermediate payments once certain milestones are completed.

Thing is, fixed-budget projects have a lot of psychological advantages for people making these kinds of decisions, in addition to just providing very pragmatic ass coverage on their part. And in the end, if the money (and stress / time) tradeoffs work out for you, that should be all that matters.

Also, once you're above the $50 an hour range it's better to bill daily or weekly anyway. There was a nice long thread about this issue a couple of weeks ago, I believe.