How much I can charge???

[seggment]

Well, Recently a person from US approched me to develop a website for his own. The purpose of this website is to maintain all his mp3 files and for the members he'll sell it off (Give access to download)
This is the core idea behind this website. The work involves...search categories and files, search members, login, converting all audio files into mp3 and upload the same. Apart from this maintainance is also involved. This is similar kind of website
www.audible.com......
But I'll be adding almost ten different categories and many files will be maintained in each category. This is the specification about the site that I'm going to develop. Can anybody(specially guys from US) tell me that how much I can charge for this kind of website?
I can expect atleast an approximate rate for this site. And how much I should get as an advance......? If i job is only to convert the audio files into mp3 format and upload them into server...how much I can charge for this? Pls kindly help me out. Tell the rates in dollors. What do you think about this?

Shri

[OddDog]

below i have pasted a little article i was starting to write about this of question ...

hope it helps a little ...

but at the end of the day only you should be able to answer your own question ....

How much should I charge for a banner? What is this work worth? What’s the difference in price between a flash site and a html site?

INTRO

These are just some of a batch of similar questions that are often asked in the Flashkit boardroom. Everybody realises that the basic formula for pricing any product is add all the costs of making that product and just add the profit margin that you wont.

Hummmmm. Sounds easy right? Well guess again. This is tough. Lets think about that a second. Neither deciding the profit margin or ones costs are easy.

You may all be thinking that I have lost my marbles and that in fact calculating your costs is easy. OK. Try to in your head. So you have got your rent, your accountants fees, all those taxes, your software licence fees, the salaries, the social security payments, the guy who comes and checks the fire extinguishers, … do not forget the hardware costs, the travelling expenses, the lunches and dinners, the corporate presents, this list is endless, almost.


PART ONE

Obviously these types of costs apply to web developers that run a business, either as a freelancer or as a corporate body. Some at the FK boardroom are keen amateurs whose costs list is not so large, working from bedrooms or spare rooms, with little overheads. If you are one of these individuals, lucky you. I am jealous of your ability to know your costs.

To be crystal clear, I know last years costs, because I have the accounts books. This years costs I can estimate, but costs evolve, they change, some grow, some shrink, some disappear all together. I would have to question someone who claims to know there costs. I do not. I have a very good idea, but I do not know them exactly. And that scares me.

The picture complicates itself further when we try to apply costs to a particular project. Hbf Solutions consists of 4 people, and hours spent on a job must be counted. In fact all working hours are accounted for. Why. That’s how we apply the costs. We calculate our general costs, and divide to get a cost per work hour. That’s why tracking the hours worked is important. Of course remember to apply the relevant project unique costs as well (travel, hardware, software, freelance costs ect..).

So that’s how much a project costs. Approximately !

PART TWO

Now onto the nice bit, the how much profit margin do you wont. I am always a little shocked at some of the comments on the boards on this subject. The most shocking has been a consistent theme that some clients can have a different price applied to them because they are big (read rich). Or worse, because they are ignorant, and do not know better. Wow.

Ignorance is not stupidity. A shoe factory owner may know little about web projects, but a couple of phone calls will enable him to get quickly up to speed on the basics like market price, and whether he really needs that dynamically updated data base driven web mammoth that you are trying to push on him. Hope we have dealt with this idea that an ignorant client is a potential soft touch. Remember our industry has a poor reputation, this is one of the greatest motives behind this poor level of credibility.

Something else that needs questioning. You get a nice client with what you consider the capability to pay for a big job. You role up your sleeves and get the budget prepared, you calculate your costs as best as you can, you add a extra few percentage points to cover yourself in case of calculating the costs incorrectly, and then decide how much money you think this job is worth in profit.


So what is your time worth? Hard one that is.

[TheOriginalFlashDavo]

As the above post says, only you can determine what to charge. The amount could be anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands, depending on such things as:

- your overheads: salaries, rent, utilities, hardware and software costs...etc

- the client: not always relevant, but the reason I take on a lot of smaller clients "on the side" so to speak is because they can't afford the budget for a large studio with all their overheads (see above)

- your experience

- your locale: both in terms of costs of living and level of competition

Though niether of these is a definitive dollar amunt, hopefully it wil help and you can understand why, in all reality, this is impossible to give.

Cheers
Dave