Programming Rates and Fees

For custom programming, we generally prefer to bill a specific agreed-upon fee for your project rather than an hourly rate.

There are two reasons we prefer a specific fee per project:

1. You know exactly what the price is for your project.

2. We know exactly what we need to do to earn the fee.

The specifications generally have a time frame for completion so you also know when you're getting your project.

The fee would be established after the specifications for the project are written. Ballpark estimates can be provided before specifications are completed, with the understanding that adding additional features or requirements is likely to change the ballpark.

Certain types of projects, however, are impossible to bid for a specific fee. Here are several examples:

1. Intermittent maintenance or tweaks.

2. Projects that need to be programmed to a certain point in order to determine direction for the rest of the project. (Programming for a third-party API, for example, then determining direction depending on the quality of the API's responses and its capabilities.)

3. Projects on a tight schedule that need to get started as soon as possible even though not all necessary information to complete the project is yet available.

4. Changes to specific fee projects requiring extra work that are added after the fee has been agreed to.

For programming that a specific fee hasn't been agreed to, an hourly rate will be applied. At the time this post is written, the hourly rate is $175 USD and the billing minimum is 30 minutes ($87.50).

Although we prefer to bid projects for a specific fee, there are projects that require hourly billing.

Will Bontrager