The naive answer I would have given at time was: "I'm a software developer who builds ecommerce and CMS sites."
And it's funny that you ask "What do you do?" At the time I had starting taking on projects from a friend who had been doing development contracting for about 4 years. One time when a client told me my proposal was priced too low and passed on my bid I was baffled.
I told my friend about it and he asked me the same question, and I gave the above answer more or less. He corrected me and said "No! You're businessman enabling a national sales channel for a local or regional business who wants to increase their revenue."
So never define your price by what you do, rather define it by what the value of thing is you're delivering to the client. This requires some research on your clients and a realignment of your thinking. When you're contracting as a developer, you have to start considering yourself as becoming a successful businessperson and not (just) a successful software engineer.
I started charing on a per week and per month basis, which was good because I stopped getting bothered with tiny projects.
Also I could choose how much hours per week I was willing to work, as long as the clients are happy they don't care if it took me 40 hours that week or 20. This also increased my effective per hour payment and my work life ballance.
It is also important to sell yourself with a higher value proposition. If you say "I'm a freelancing front-end dev who does JavaScript" they won't pay you as good as when you say "I'm a mobile consultant, who designs and implements apps", even if you do basically the same thing, people suddendly realize that you are a specialist and not some code monkey...
> And I'm not kidding myself. Most companies know they can get good devs for significantly less than 400/hr.
You can get a great dev for much, much less than $400/hr. You're right. However, should I charge less than that to do a few hours of work for you? Absolutely not.
If I'm doing a small project for a few hours for you I have to charge a lot to cover the business costs.
Yeah, the projects I'm pricing out are usually 200-1400/hrs. I can totally see that rate for smaller projects. I imagine utilization rates are a lot harder to keep high with work that granular.
Yes absolutely. If I have a client that's going to drop a thousand plus hours into the project they're getting charged a quarter of what someone who just needs me to log in once and a while gets charged.
I know there's an international tax lawyer in SF charging $1250 hour. If you want the big bucks, law's one of the places to get it (provided, presumably, you work hard and are very smart).
I think they mean that that's the estimated time allotted for the project. What they're implying is that they charge less because of it, but if they worked shorter projects, they would likely charge more.
If you're willing to get someone to pay you 400/hr, I bet you're not billing/marketing yourself as a developer.
And I'm not kidding myself. Most companies know they can get good devs for significantly less than 400/hr.