Pricing for a Website

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you can’t really assign a fixed price to a site – typically you make an estimate up front and then try to keep to that. in your case with learning, it’s harder, but then you should figure what it’s worth to you to do the site and learn at the same time and talk with the client and let them know that and give them a number…you are very at risk at this stage of having to eat a lot of cost because your client has no idea what you’ll be charging…

say, for example, that i told you here that a site with that type of content, video, etc. etc. should be worth $1000 – could you go to your client now with a $1k bill in hand and get paid?

if you totally treated it as a learning experience and you’ve had no discussions about cost to this point, then i’d go to your client and ask them they think the site is worth and go from there. you can’t now blind-side them with an invoice for an amount, as what you invoice for may be _Way_ more than they can/want to pay…then if that happens, you’re stuck either just lowering your total (which is going to look odd to the client – if you can just lower the bill, why were you charging so much in the first place) or just burn the bridge with the client and try to get them to pay – either is not a good situation, i’m afraid… 🙁

all of this said, that site looks like it would typically go in the $500 – $1k range (considering the quality of work and also factoring in assumptions about that client being a smaller fish in the world, which is also a factor and not meant to be an insult to them), although it would depend how much video editing had to happen – if you did a lot of video work, the site gets much more expensive quick…

hope that helps…

sitruc

[Avrohom Kohn]

Hi Curtis.

Your reply helped me more than you can imagine. Thank you for your input.

I don’t have any problem submitting the bill to client, and here’s why.
He’s a long established client who has done print graphics with me many times in the past. This is his first web job, and one of my first web assignments. When he gave me the job, he asked for a quote. At that time I had no idea, but I thought, to cover myself, I should pitch it high – so I said it could be as much as $2500. He did raise his eyebrows and asked why so much – I told him I couldn’t be sure at that stage of how much coding was involved, and that I hoped it would be lower.

So now, you may ask, what’s the problem – why not charge as much as I feel like up to that amount? And the answer is trust – I know he’s going to pay whatever I ask. He knows I’m going to be perfectly honest and fair. So I needed to know how much such a site would cost when done by someone else, in order to know the fair market price. And you’ve given me the answer – or AN answer which helps tremendously.

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

[avrnosn] “So now, you may ask, what’s the problem – why not charge as much as I feel like up to that amount”

i wouldn’t ask that at all – that’s a lot to charge somebody for something, and i don’t believe in gouging people just because you can…

and wrt to the price – it does depend on the amount of video work done, but i’d say for the site alone (separating the video and assuming that it was handed to me all done and ready to go), i’d say probably in the $750 range maybe? then tack on your video work and you’ll get a total… 🙂

sitruc