How do you price your web development business?

[michaeldlevy]

I am pretty new to freelancing and want to make sure I am accurately pricing myself correctly for my business. For those of you who do web design, development and/or graphic design, how do you determine what to charge?

Examples include:

1. Domain costs
2. Hosting costs
3. On-going support

Also what is the best way to go about creating a business plan? Thanks everyone in advance for your thoughts on this topic!

 

[elfgirl]

I would recommend you charge hourly. Depending on your experience, you can charge anything from $20 per hour on up.
For domain and hosting I would just markup 10%
For on-going support, maybe think about offering a monthly price for X amount of hours of support.

I hope this helps. I have never personally been in your field but I have helped a friend launch a couple of related businesses.

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

If you are going to offer hosting to a handful of clients then mark it up way more than 10%. The absolute minimum I would charge for hosting of any site regardless of how small it is would be $10 per month. If you have them on a shared reseller hosting account then you that markup is into the thousands of percent.

It is not worth your time to host anyone at a 10% markup unless your entire business was just a hosting business and that is all you focused on. Even then you should mark up your product more than that.

Small business owners don't mind paying more than $20 per month to host their websites in my experience, even if their website could easily be hosted on a $2 per month server.

One of the biggest mistakes that new entrepreneurs make is to under-price their products and services. It is okay to do that for your first ten customers or so, but you better raise your prices up as soon as you have a little bit of work. Don't make the mistake that I made when I first went into business for myself. I underpriced myself for years. I had plenty of work but running my own business was hell because I wasn't making anywhere near the kind of money I deserved. Once I raised my prices drastically, then I started actually enjoying my work. My work got better because I dropped the small percentage of price sensitive customers I had but was able to deliver better service to those customers who weren't cheapskates. My best customers became happier. I became happier. I made a lot more money doing less work.

Don't compete on price. Compete on service, dependability and your awesome response time to customers.

 

[johnny_r]

I just try to calculate the needed hours for a project.

For longtime customers it's easier and I just count the hours and calculate the final price after the work is done.