Ballpark market price for freelance work

[Jenner]

I received a call yesterday from an old employer of mine that I worked for back in 2003 when I wrote an elaborate piece of software for them in Access VBA.

My entire department was dissolved due to the dotCOM fallout but the phone call basically went something like: "When your department was dissolved, quality went to hell, I was hired in 3 years ago, I'm trying to pick up the pieces and get things back to at least what they used to be, and then I discovered your marvelous program..."

He found my name and number in the Help->About section I made in my program, something I left there just in case this scenario happened and I was either let go, moved on, or transferred and the plant wanted some maintenance done on the software.

It sounds like my program functionally went dead about a year ago due to IT changes (probably moved the location of the back-end databases and never re-directed the software to the new location) but I may be getting into some outside contract/freelance work to rebuild/repair/remake this software.

I've got no experience in freelance programming work, and I'm curious what the ballpark going rate would be? Various websites I've hit trying to answer this question give me a pretty wide range.

I figures I'd ask on here since there would be a fair number of developers on here who have a good grasp of that market.

[ElPresidente408]

I've seen very large ranges as well and am curious what comes out of this thread. I have seen price quotes (for what I consider very basic macro programming) at the equivalent of $150/hr. It depends how knowledgeable the person you deal with is. I would never pay $150 for the level of work that was offered by this person, however others who have no knowledge of programming actually see it as quite a bargain.

[RhinoBull]

$150 is an average rate that contractors charge when they have direct contract; when you work through third party hourly rate these days could be anywhere between $45 - $60.
I would start with $150 if they contract you directly but leave room for negotiation.

[RobDog888]

Easiest way is to search the job boards for contracting positions and see what they are offering. Take the high only if you feel confident you wont blow them off completely. Otherwise an upper arverage is a good place to start.

[Pino]

Be honest, quote what you think you need.

Rates here range from £25 to £100 per hour for standard contractors. But its completely different across the pond.

[Jenner]

Thanks for your advice guys. Met with the guy last night at the place I used to work at and got my original program working again for a really nice $50 dinner and the possibility of a future re-write. So, something may still come out of this where I charge my time or not, I don't know. Had a good time though.

[gep13]

Good effort!! Must have been an easy fix then?

I think it always help to be willing to help in these situations, rather than demanding lots of money up front. If you are willing to help, and are nice about it, you always leave the door open for more work, as you have discovered.

Gary

[szlamany]

Keep in mind that the value you have to offer this company is "knowing the business model" - which you must have achieved to some level when you wrote the app in the first place - right?

In our area of the country $150 for a consultant is pretty common - it's not outside the normal range that's for sure. As long as you are not completely rural corn-field Ohio then I would imagine it's similar where you are.

You also have to remember that as the size of the job increases the "hourly fee" component kind of falls out of view and gets replaced with the "what we need to make in a month" in order to be profitable doing development.

[Jenner]

As long as you are not completely rural corn-field Ohio...

I am in completely rural corn-field Ohio actually...

Ok, not THAT bad, the large Amish farms are 20 miles to the east of me. Yea, the problem wasn't bad. That little VBA program I made was exceptionally well designed. An INI file in C:\Windows contained pathing information to the server and the names of the server database files. Since the network got shuffled around, it stopped working.

My god, how did I ever get anything done in VBA? The program has other issues as well in various other modules. I know they were working when I left and can't for the life of me figure out why they aren't working now. The primary modules are functional though. The data import routines and about 90% of the reporting works so they're good.

Most of those broken modules are for maintenance and data auditing. Nobody knew the admin password either so I had to go into the program and hack it from within and force it to write some new encrypted admin entries into the password table. When I left the company, I left copies of the uncompiled .mdb files on a maintenance portion of the network drive as well as the compiled .mde executables.

Considering the amateurish little program lasted 5 years after I left made me proud of the thing. I'm actually; whether they take me on as a consultant or not; considering rewriting it in VB.NET and possibly marketing it to the manufacturing sector... that is, if there is any manufacturing left here in midwest Ohio after this recession.

[Max Peck]

Thanks for your advice guys. Met with the guy last night at the place I used to work at and got my original program working again for a really nice $50 dinner and the possibility of a future re-write. So, something may still come out of this where I charge my time or not, I don't know. Had a good time though.

Your flexibility there may go a long way toward getting yourself additional work with the client. You showed them that their need was more important than getting top dollar for it. Obviously you don't want to give away your services but you established a good foot-in-the-door there. Nicely done.

-Max

[Dave Sell]

I am in completely rural corn-field Ohio actually...

Considering the amateurish little program lasted 5 years after I left made me proud of the thing. I'm actually; whether they take me on as a consultant or not; considering rewriting it in VB.NET and possibly marketing it to the manufacturing sector... that is, if there is any manufacturing left here in midwest Ohio after this recession.

Hey, congrats on this success story. Can you breifly describe what your software did, and how it applies to the mfg industry? I understand you haven't re-written it in .NET yet, but we are always looking for software to sell to our customers.

[Jenner]

It was a program that parsed the text-file output from PC-DMIS; a Metrology program used in CMMs and organized it into batches and ran reports on it. Studies run were typically 5 and 25-piece lots, so the results were the averages of those runs with standard statistical elements such as standard deviation, Pp, Ppk, etc. It didn't store the raw piece-by-piece data, rather only the statistical results of the study (raw data would have eaten far too much room).

Studies were organized by part, and parts were arranged by car model (this was for the auto industry). Thus, the CMM operator would choose the model, choose the part number being run, and select the directory with the 5 text-files from the study, and the program would import them to the database.

The data could then be compared to other studies of the same part, or of a "sister part" (sometimes the manufacturing process produced two or more identical parts, these were stored as different part identifiers within the system so the individual processes could be compared), or even of a "mirror part" (left door vs. right door for example). Data was either purely numerical, or graphed in reports. For example, you could take the last 3 years worth of studies on a door part, pick a point you'd be interested in, and it would graph the mean and upper/lower variances for that point through every study in that timeframe.

You could even get rankings on whole car models where it would load up the most recent study of every part in the car model and give you %conformance, average Pp and Ppk for them.