How Prices Are Determined
What's the process that determines prices?
I try and make my process for determining the price that I charge for projects as transparent as possible. I want to give wiggle room for both the client and I so that what I develop is as near to their vision as what their budget allows them to be. The first part of my process is to break down the project into its individual components. For example, if I'm building a portfolio website I might say that the blog is one component, the gallery is another, the contact page is another, the content management system for the blog is another, and the content management system for the gallery is another. From there, if the individual component is complex enough, I might then break that down into individual components of their own. In order for me to understand the project enough to do this there has to be a lot of communication. It might take 3 or 4 e-mails before I come back with a solid price point.
Example: An Artists Portfolio
- The Design
- Animated interactive flash banner
- The blog
- Database setup
- User comments
- Ability to categorize posts
- A search engine
- Dynamically adding posts
- WYSIWYG style editor
- Ability to upload files/images to blog post
- The gallery
- Dynamically adding images
- Ability to create categories of images
- Dynamically adding categories
- Limit to n number of images per page
- Ability to add description to image and link to blog post
- About me page
- Contact page
Now that I broke everything down I can determine how long they are going to take and the relative complexity of each one. My major factor in coming up with a price for a project is exactly how long it's going to take. The search engine might take me an hour to develop, while programming in the ability for a visitor to make comments might take me 2 hours. Therefore I'm likely to charge twice as much for the user comments feature as the search engine feature. The way I break it down and assign prices to individual components allows for you to determine exactly how important a feature might be while considering your budget. I will never just throw a price at you, I'll do my best to explain where the numbers are coming from.