This topic is locked

do you charge clients more/less for phprunner projects?

10/29/2015 9:58:39 AM
PHPRunner General questions
W
wfcentral author

This may not be the right place to post this, but I did not see a "casual conversation" area in the forums...
Not asking for exact hourly rates. Just curious to hear from other freelancers.
At one time I charged different hourly rates based on what I was doing. Simple HTML or content editing was low rate, graphic design medium rate, database work was a higher rate.
A few years ago I just switched to a flat rate because I figured my time was work $X amount and it would all balance out because I could do a lot more HTML simple stuff in an hour than I could database work. So, I felt like all my clients were getting billed correctly.
Now, that I'm doing phprunner I can build a complete database interface in one hour that would have taken me 10 hours before. So, in a sense if I keep my hourly rate the same I am making 1/10th the amount.
There is a joke about Picasso being on a beach and doing a quick pencil sketch of a lady. She asks to buy it and he says "sure, that will be $5,000." she says "are you crazy? it only took you 5 minutes to draw that..." Picasso says "true, but it took a lifetime to learn HOW to draw it."
So, in that same sense I have been using phprunner for YEARS and this gives me the ability now to do 10 hours or work in 1 hour.

HJB 10/30/2015

Thanks for this very interesting posting. Indeed, with PHPR v8.1 being the world's best RAD tool seen ever, the dramatic reduction in regard to production time gave me some headache too of what to really charge. Example: I own amicable relations with a shipping agent for whom I installed the first "Frontpage" in 1990 and presented a signature pad featuring "power of attorney" issuance oriented app in just one hour in 2014, for demo purposes and in the aim to somehow get rid of the current status quo at his end in regard to his USA based clientele which is to download a PDF file, then to fill the form to be scanned later on into the desktop after form filling and then to be returned as e-mail attachment to the shipping agent on a very simple issue. Surprisingly (I mean, it's a business friend of mine who ships 30'000 vehicles abroad a year since more than 25 years, with a team of 25 in staff) I was not even honoured a simple ACK in regard to the fully functional online demo provided which gave me a great concern that way that I could not yet find an answer on this:
If a time and biz life saving online app demo could not even induce a more than 25 years business friend to simply say "Okay, thank you", what can I expect to market elsewhere if I'm presenting things to absolutely NEW CUSTOMERS?
The speed and simplicity inside PHPR v8.1 bears a kind of high "witch hunting" effect in it as people around are simply crying out like ones who e.g. got lost in a coal mine for some weeks without any daylight after the rescuers finally having been torchlighting them direct into their eyes.
Worst, while the boss remained silent, one meanwhile became a true target of his highly agressive staff that way, me and the boss feel more comfortable via Teamviewer or else remote tool jobs rather than to let me physically appear in his office as of course people around are seeing, it really works, hence fears to lose their jobs at the end of the day are creating "aggressive emotions" anyway, seeing that the code generator's one hour working time product to simply subsitute their daily doings at a glance.
Anyway, sales of "999 gold material based RAD tooled stirr-up holders for business horse riders" truly turned into PICASSO like paintings where people are telling you, why you even try to charge them anything at all.
P.S. Or say, if I would address the forum admin (as I did already years ago in regard to a maritime issue which is a true gold mine for PPHR v8.1 to run real-time based data mining at a glance) to apply his hourly rates published on the web under PROFIT SHARING terms, he won't believe it at all, though being the developer of the product, as crazy as it may sound to you at this stage, simply due to the fact that like my friend (a 25 years operating shipping agent) as mentioned above, it would turn out to a situation to torchlight someone direct into his eyes who stayed weeks long in a coal mine without day any light.

HJB 10/30/2015



Thanks for this very interesting posting. Indeed, with PHPR v8.1 being the world's best RAD tool seen ever, the dramatic reduction in regard to production time gave me some headache too of what to really charge. Example: I own amicable relations with a shipping agent for whom I installed the first "Frontpage" in 1990 and presented a signature pad featuring "power of attorney" issuance oriented app in just one hour in 2014, for demo purposes and in the aim to somehow get rid of the current status quo at his end in regard to his USA based clientele which is to download a PDF file, then to fill the form to be scanned later on into the desktop after form filling and then to be returned as e-mail attachment to the shipping agent on a very simple issue. Surprisingly (I mean, it's a business friend of mine who ships 30'000 vehicles abroad a year since more than 25 years, with a team of 25 in staff) I was not even honoured a simple ACK in regard to the fully functional online demo provided which gave me a great concern that way that I could not yet find an answer on this:
If a time and biz life saving online app demo could not even induce a more than 25 years business friend to simply say "Okay, thank you", what can I expect to market elsewhere if I'm presenting things to absolutely NEW CUSTOMERS?
The speed and simplicity inside PHPR v8.1 bears a kind of high "witch hunting" effect in it as people around are simply crying out like ones who e.g. got lost in a coal mine for some weeks without any daylight after the rescuers finally having been torchlighting them direct into their eyes.
Worst, while the boss remained silent, one meanwhile became a true target of his highly agressive staff that way, me and the boss feel more comfortable via Teamviewer or else remote tool jobs rather than to let me physically appear in his office as of course people around are seeing, it really works, hence fears to lose their jobs at the end of the day are creating "aggressive emotions" anyway, seeing that the code generator's one hour working time product to simply subsitute their daily doings at a glance.
Anyway, sales of "999 gold material based RAD tooled stirr-up holders for business horse riders" truly turned into PICASSO like paintings where people are telling you, why you even try to charge them anything at all.
P.S. Or say, if I would address the forum admin (as I did already years ago in regard to a maritime issue which is a true gold mine for PHPR v8.1 to run real-time based data mining at a glance) to apply his hourly rates published on the web under PROFIT SHARING terms, he won't believe it at all, though being the developer of the product, as crazy as it may sound to you at this stage, simply due to the fact that like my friend (a 25 years operating shipping agent) as mentioned above, it would turn out to a situation to torchlight someone direct into his eyes who stayed weeks long in a coal mine without any daylight. Even recent attempts to show RAM operations of MySQL with some 9600 MB/s read/write cycled led to confusion and total discouraging ticket feedback. Or say, we are living in very tough and hard times these days at all ends when it comes to the term "Make money, not friends!" by code generated cloud apps.

W
wfcentral author 11/4/2015

walk2fly - I appreciate your response. Not sure I quite grasped all of it. I read several parts multiple times to try and understand what you were getting at and still not 100% sure I get your point.

HJB 11/4/2015

@wfcentral - Dealt somehow around yours "... it only took you 5 minutes to draw that..." Picasso says..."

Admin 11/5/2015

This is a really good and, apparently, complicated question. Lots of good advice on internet in favor of both approaches.
Here is my take on this. For smaller projects or for new clients choose fixed price. New clients most likely don't care about your process. They just need to get the job done. When determine the price take into consideration how this client found you and what are their alternatives. For instance, if client was referred to you by another client meaning you already have a certain amount of trust - then by all means charge more.
Once you established the good working relationship with the client you can switch to hourly rate. Just make sure to set the rate is you are comfortable with. Do not charge less for easier stuff, it just doesn't make any sense.
Just one extra bit of info. Nowdays nobody builds a website from scratch. People will use a tool like PHPRunner, or a framework, or some sort of CMS (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal) with appropriate template. That being said you cannot set your hourly rate 10 times higher than other developers simply because you use a tool that lets you develop 10 times faster. Take into consideration what other options your client has i.e. how fast they can develop something like this in-house and how much would it cost.

HJB 11/13/2015

@admin - thanks for having spending your valuable time to provide strategic hints on this issue. As for me, seeing the Xlinesoft products be as well exported into cheap hourly labor countries, it depends so much on your local clientele area and its loyality to "... to pay for a $5'000 Picasso created in just 5 minutes..." is all about. On the other hand, with true time is money and biz life saving coding like your today's "In-Place-Editing" I think, there are TWO different kinds of approach, say, 1st is a PASSIVE one to wait for clients and their incoming demands to be paid for at a price under the tactical scheme as per your given hints on the issue, second is an ACTIVE one, aiming NOT to wait for any client's ideas to be turned into interactive code at all, but to promote fresh time saving injection from the developer's end in regard to further extreme working time savings by e.g. "In-Place-Editing" issues as above, in short, to try to sell ... "... a PICASSO like commercially oriented biz dialogue system, created in just less than 90 seconds or even less ..." at $4'999 or so, just my 2 cents on the issue.

lefty 11/13/2015



@admin - thanks for having spending your valuable time to provide strategic hints on this issue. As for me, seeing the Xlinesoft products be as well exported into cheap hourly labor countries, it depends so much on your local clientele area and its loyality to "... to pay for a $5'000 Picasso created in just 5 minutes..." is all about. On the other hand, with true time is money and biz life saving coding like your today's "In-Place-Editing" I think, there are TWO different kinds of approach, say, 1st is a PASSIVE one to wait for clients and their incoming demands to be paid for at a price under the tactical scheme as per your given hints on the issue, second is an ACTIVE one, aiming NOT to wait for any client's ideas to be turned into interactive code at all, but to promote fresh time saving injection from the developer's end in regard to further extreme working time savings by e.g. "In-Place-Editing" issues as above, in short, to try to sell ... "... a PICASSO like commercially oriented biz dialogue system, created in just less than 90 seconds or even less ..." at $4'999 or so, just my 2 cents on the issue.



I have a different take on this . I believe ASPRUNNER / PHPRUNNER to be the fastest way to get data/Analytics to a client . Now should we tell the client that ? Not / or maybe. If a particular template is not neccessary and the client just wants analytics then you are golden with this product and can charge by the solution. If the client wants wordpress,drupal, joomala or etc.... then complications arise and the price jumps way up . Let me give you an example , I wrote a solution for my company that I work for but I am not part of the IT department and do it on the weekends . They could not find a quick solution for what they needed and because I was a liasion between IT in a way from past experience and I was actually part of the position I saw thier needs and found this product in 2005 . I had some programming background in PIC , COBOL and ASP . I found this product was easy to setup as database connections and setting grids and setting up templates was a well a pain in the a..... with other products. I wrote a program for this company and we determined that since nobody else in the country had anything like it , it is worth 15,000 to 20,0000 now. It took my first version about 5 months to build . I am now on my 8th version and changed from ASP to PHP and I think this is worth up to 30,000.00 . OR buy license 50.00 per user per year. I have other company's intrested in my product but since this is not my field and have other position I have not proceeded . You can and if you are full time with this find many small to mid size businesss that would love this products output. IT all starts with that first company. Now I do think this product needs to step up with a full mobile/application ? What do I mean . I mean CSS/HTML/JAVASCRIPT and PHONEGAP/CORDOVA. This in turn makes the product Quadruple the value with it's output. If you are just helping out a small company and are advanced in Javascript / PHP / ASP / CSS You can charge anywhere from 50 to 100 an hour with this products output capabilities as it saves enourmous time compared to other solutuons out there. You also have to consider the server setup as windows server is needed I believe IIS . If you are not running right from a hosting environment or VPS with libraries you need , You may have to install GD library for example for thumbnail images or other libraries to run your output. That for me is the harder part , Another example is to optimize speed . I have run ASPRunner / PHPrunner on other servers that were shared hosting environments and no access to adjust settings so it ran slow. I now run one of my products output on ininsprunner / same company as we are talking about . There are no bells and whistles but it is fast. So there are other things to consider. Feel Free to chime in.

romaldus 11/13/2015

In 2014 I charge USD $20,000 for a phprunner project (material management system), buit for a drilling company.

jadachDevClub member 11/20/2015

Hello PHP folks. I come from the ASPRunner.Net forum.
This is a very interesting topic. For me, it makes no difference as to the tool I use. I typically give an estimate for the overall project, then charge hourly for any work after it goes live. I try to stay consistent.
For all my public facing website projects, I use SQL Server, Visual Studio, Photoshop and ASPRunner.net.
I've had great success building websites in Visual Studio, using the Foundation by Zurb responsive framework. Sorry Sergey, some people still build websites <img src='https://asprunner.com/forums/file.php?topicimage=1&fieldname=reply&id=78313&image=1&table=forumreplies' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> - much more secure and you can tailor the site to fit the exact needs of the customer.
I then build the CMS that controls the entire website using ASPRunner.Net. I have customers maintaining multiple websites from a single ASPRunner.Net application.
If the project is more of a line-of-business application, I will strictly use ASPRunner.Net and SQL Server.
Time is money, and when you compete you need an edge. ASPRunner.Net is my edge.

T
timh 11/22/2015

Really interesting question.

Yes-PHBR is a brilliant tool, but it is just that; It does need expertise behind it, to interpret what the customer wants and determine the best way to deliver their needs. That expertise doesn't come cheap particularly if it is backed by years of experience. Remember a 747 Jumbo is easy to fly, it just needs years of experience when things go wrong!

HJB 1/8/2016

@admin - Citing yours "Once you established the good working relationship with the client you can switch to hourly rate".
After recent purchase of some templates/plugins I spent some days to run some testing during the cool leisure time of XMAS and NEW YEAR, e.g. among others the MASSMAILER2 in particular in the aim to make "friends" (yours "Once you established the good working relationship with the client..." refers...) I have to say that the developer team had been really performing to provide a basic vessel to run a maiden voyage on the international seas of communication, YET, I got stuck on some problems to bring the solution to the port authority which simply wants to run cargo tracking notes under the following time oriented issues (abstracted):
quote
Long distance:

◾ Not later than 24h before loading in the port of departure.

◾ B and G Cargo: Not later than 4 h prior to the ship’s arrival in the first port.
Short Sea Shipping:

◾ Containers / Trailers / Conventional / Bulk: 2h prior to the ship’s arrival at the first port.

◾ Towed trailers: 1 hour prior to arrival at the port of entry.  
unquote
The above is just the tip of an iceberg after an online demo of mine on 28th Oct 2013 (I mean, well before the THREE major upgrades for v8.0 at that, not talking about the v8.1 features and upgrades here at all) where a monthly fee of $70'000 on the issue was OKAYED, yet could not be finalized to some stupid bankers which raised the KYC (Know Your Customer) issue (say, you need to somehow explain that you e.g. only are about to use the world's best RAD tool with maybe even highest $20/mo. Inspirunner account and a $20/mo. Internet line cost with a notebook PC paid since long to serve a port authority with six sea ports and 1400 vessels a month traffic).
As the MASSMAILER with some SQL queries cold turn WATER INTO WINE here on the new 2016 ise of the port authority once functional, I did not want to post my minor problems in this forum (with no support fee paid yet)for forum policy reasons, but just wanted to express that of course PHPR is the world's best RAD tool ever seen on this planet, yet people around me are just consumers, not producers, so I didn't want to miss to just place my meagre 2 cents the issue named "Once you established the good working relationship with the client..."in junction with this income oriented thread.