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.