Posted by lawrence k on 12/20/05 18:33

j_mckitrick@bigfoot.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been asked to do my first php project, other than my personal
> homepage. I'm an experienced developer, and after getting a couple of
> books and doing some experimenting, I'm generating pdf reports from
> data files and getting ready to add mysql support.
>
> Are there any guidelines I can follow for pricing a php/web project?
> Hourly doesn't seem right for *this* project, since I was still
> learning php. But from here on out, I should be much faster. But how
> do I charge for *this* one?

I'd ask around and try to figure out what an experienced programmer
would have charged for it. Let's assume a good programmer would have
wanted $30 to $50 an hour (depending on where you live) and could have
done the whole thing in 20 hours - the price should be between $600 and
a $1000. You may have taken 50 hours because you were learning, but you
should not charge for the extra 30 hours. To get an estimate of how
much time an experienced programmer would have put in, you'll need to
offer more details of the project, either here or by sending it to
programmers you know. Make sure the programmers understand script
languages, as writing the thing from scratch in C would have taken
longer, and a C programmer would overestimate the time it might take to
do something in a script language.

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