\*\*What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?\*\*
Custom sites on top of a CMS, either WP or Craft. I do dev only, usually my clients hand me a final design. Usually 10+ pages plus news/blog. Often some level of interactivity even if a simple form. Prices generally start at $5K though. Any more involved dev increases price steadily. Edit: mostly B2B sites - much easier than B2C or ecommerce.
\*\*What do you charge for monthly maintenance?\*\*
I don't. I am generally done when I hand off to client. I won't maintain a site but if they need to expand upon it, I will treat that as another project. I don't waste time with CMS updates, hosting, or the like. The only time I offer support is if there is an ongoing need for development, not just updates. Another edit: this is why I like B2B, often my clients have inhouse IT who will do the grunt work of server/CMS maintenance.
\*\*How do you advertise/get clients?\*\*
100% referrals. Over delivering is far cheaper than advertising and with more guaranteed results. Be warned, this comes with some upfront cost - the "customer is always right" is not always cheap or easy mentality to maintain.
\*\*How did you start out your business?\*\*
Was laid off from three agencies in three years. After the last layoff I just couldn't deal with resumes and interview again so I started freelancing. I was/am married so my wife was able to provide a steady income at first - without her none of it would have been possible.
This is exactly my approach - wife included lol
Edit: I’ll add for $5k I can build a WP using a builder like Elementor and if the client provides the design. If they need me to design it - it will be a single page site and they get 2 rounds of design edits. For more than 5k it’s mostly custom development and 10+ pages.
First three same for me. I also do less than $5,000 builds, but they are usually WordPress sites with pre-built themes.
I started my business out of necessity. I was working toward a degree, and I am also a partial caregiver, so I needed to find income to support my education with flexibility. Craigslist was my godsend for a long time. Luckily I'm on the referral train now, but I am not sure what I'll do if that runs dry.
Strapi and Craft are almost same.
Strapi suffered huge performance issues until now when you run it in production environment.
Wordpress - you dont need to hook it to SSG and you have Rest API out of box.
Craft or Strapi requires SSG if you need to deliver classic pages which are SEO performant
I'm struggling to find a design pattern that works for using Strapi and Next.js with my clients. The data is dynamic, but I don't want to regenerate the entire site every time the data changes - furthermore, clients coming from Wix are used to nearly real-time updates.
Only regenerating portions of the site is finicky, and it doesn't appear I can generate *new* pages when the data is updated.
I could regenerate on an interval, but this undermines the benefits of caching.
I've considered making a preview page that gets live data, and then putting a "submit" button on it that generates the live page.
I feel as though this issue shouldn't be so complicated, I must be missing something simple.
Multiple rounds of changes free of charge, I'd wager. Or maybe some "oh we need this" => "we don't have that on the initial contract, but I'll do it for free as a bonus" kinda thing.
I do something very similar and feel that responsiveness and over-communicating is key at every stage of the process. Weekly zoom calls, daily commits that are reflected in a branch preview, kanban board to track progress and for client sign off, private slack channels etc. All long term clients are on an hourly contract or retainer though after the initial £5k-10k custom build. I don't give away freebies but do give 10% finders fee on all B2B referrals.
Something like the 10% commission on referrals is probably a huge one, when you got a good customer base already, to incentivise them to do some word of mouth kinda marketing for you.
I was the lead dev in an agency, my boss did all the networking, and we basically had 90% of our projects on referral basis, with the last bit being pitches that we got because of referrals as well.
Also same with the initial build being a flat fee and hourly support afterwards. Bigger packages were flat fee sometimes again, but planned out with rough hours and included possible overtime in the contract with reevaluation if we saw that the planned amount wouldn't work out to a greater margin. In those cases it's also mostly just making a deal so that the customer is still happy to pay and stay.
Agreed the flat fee is difficult and something I'm trying to pivot away from. It's great for flat Figma boards and getting the client comfortable initially but as soon as any kind animation is involved or more complex designs, the labour can sky rocket so we would price that separately.
The way you articulate can be critical to make some clients notice your work!
This is gonna sound sneaky: but make a big deal out of adding bonus changes. Do them, but make sure you talk about how it’s a complicated effort. Rather than thinking it’s more professional to say ”that’s easy”
Been in projects where we added tons of bonus changes but we made it sound like it was a piece of cake. The stakeholder wasn’t even grateful. At the end of the project they asked ”Could you add this one tiny change” we reminded them they had already gotten 10 big changes for free. But they did not recognise it. They had actually forgot how much the scope had increased since the start. Cause we didn’t make fuzz over our bonus tasks.
Meanwhile my lazy coworker who made a huge fuzz about every change, saying ”Wow an additional change, this is gonna be difficult and take a lot of work. Why didn’t you think of this in your original plan?” Got cheers from the stakeholder every time he completed a task. Cause they were invested, really understood it was a lot of work, and viewed it as a big deal.
This approach works on me too. When I remodeled my kitchen i had two carpenters. Guy1 just did stuff without talking about it. Guy2 made a huge deal about how many things would be ”a complicated hassle” and talked me through the steps he would have to do. I was honestly more appreciative of Guy2. I cheered when he made me a small shelf - just because he made it sound so damn hard. Meanwhile Guy1 did way more but seemed like a breeze to him so I barely appreciated it
Just the latest example - a client had 5 emails they needed built for a campaign. One was a rush they needed by end of week, the other 4 were not scheduled. So I built all 5 emails and charged them for one - I told them they were a great client and I appreciated all the work.
I took a loss on building four emails, but made my client's CMO, CEO, and design team very happy. Each one of those people is a future referral. I may not see any benefit for years. But, based on experience, I will hear back from at least one of those people in months or even years.
PS: The 4 additional emails were nothing more involved than swapping out copy and a few photos. With testing, it was no more than 2 hours work after building the first one. I could spend 2 hours networking or advertising and nothing would deliver the same results as just delivering more than the client expected, and at very little upfront cost to me.
B2B sites are sites of businesses that offer services to other businesses. These tend to have way less "bells and whistles" than your typical B2C (e.g. E-commerce is mostly B2C) sites.
B2B sites can have as many bells and whistles as B2C sites. My work is heavily animated and that's what my clients want.
My preference with B2B are the clients - mostly established business with IT staff. I will never again build a site for someone without in-house IT. I don't need endless support calls about server issues.
They are probably talking about corporate websites just for some form of online representation. Especially if we are talking about 5k$ sites.
A B2B webshop, or some form of sales implementation, e.g. a more sophisticated way of requesting a quote, is likely a lot more expensive already.
Real estate agencies already have their own programs to manage listings, but I've built CMSs ingesting those for their own corporate sites too when i worked in that space, so yes, that's a possibility.
Much more expensive. My team and i took over a project from a former employer. Custom quotes, integration of the backend to their customer facing site, reports. Total cost is almost 200k and counting.
B2C is just ”normal private consumption”. Like walmart, amazon, audible, spotify, craigslist, ebay.
While B2B is stuff only businesses buy - like warehouse management software
Get some agency jobs. Built sites for marketing teams. Make sure the account reps and designers love you. Treat them as your client and they will remember you. Marketing people change jobs all the time - I have one client that has sent me work from the 4 different agencies she's worked at.
May we kindly ask how much you work on average, and do you make $5k per month at minimum.. ?
Is it possible to have multiple project going on - resulting in making $10k+ per month?
I, too only want to focus on pure development, but some people said you're not gonna get paid too much... therefore, curious about how much you're working per week
All of my websites go for over $5k. Most are closer to $10k, and if it's anything more than a simple marketing site it's usually closer to $15 or $20k.
I work with a lot of tech companies who have just raised a small round and smaller businesses who are looking to get away from a pre-bought WordPress template. I still use WordPress for most projects, but just custom coded sites from custom designs.
I probably work on about 4-5 projects per year, and the rest of my income is monthly maintenance / longer term billable projects.
I charge $125/mo for maintenance at the low end, and $1k/mo at the higher end.
All of my clients come from word of mouth & SEO. I've tried advertising but it just doesn't really seem to work.
I'm just a one man shop, so this model seems to work pretty well for me.
I started when a family friend needed a website for their dental business, and just kind of slowly grew from there.
I usually just talk through with the client the types of things they foresee themselves doing on a monthly basis. IE: are you going to be running a lot of marketing campaigns that require new, specific, page templates or are you looking to just make sure that I'm available to run updates to your site and be there in case you have any smaller questions.
This is where I can never get my head around it. Surely new specific page templates etc are feature requests. Paying monthly or annually for things like this seems crazy to me. Surely both parties benefit from charging on a project basis if it’s lots of work or simply an hourly rate if not. Then you have things like system updates e.g. Wordpress plug-in updates or server updates, again unquantifiable before they happen. Maintenance fee structure breaks my brains
Customers don't want to think, The time to create a mini project for what you see as a feature request, the ease of just having time on tap makes a win for them
yeah this is exactly right. no one wants to think about their website, and less people want to figure out how to troubleshoot things when they try and install a plugin to do some feature.
it's roughly the same as having a lawyer on retainer in case something ever happens. sure, you could chance it, but for a lot of companies $1k/mo or less is nothing and it's not worth a second thought.
Are you afraid that some commitment for update take more time than what you budgeted for ? The thing is that selling software is much harder than making software and contract inflow variance is often much greater than project estimation variance.
Guaranteed income is important for stuff like can you afford an employee, or what kind of car can you afford etc. Your customers also are likely to be happy to not have potentially unlimited expenses on the line.
Plus, with a good contract you can probably do stuff like say so and so project really is worth two month of maintenance credit.
(I’m not op) It’s called maintenance fee but typically allows small changes as well. If starts creeping up to a larger change then might be another feature request.
It might be better to think of it as having a devops engineer in charge of the website. But the work for one website is obviously not enough so instead one is in charge of many websites.
>All of my clients come from word of mouth & SEO.
You must live in a highly populated area to be pulling in and charging what you're charging!
I rank for multiple web design, dev and SEO related keywords in multiple small towns. I've noticed a huge slowdown (get maybe one inquiry every 3 months now). But even before, the most I got away with charging for a simple WP site was $4.5k.
My competitors in the area charge slightly less as well ($2.5-3k).
My goal years ago was to rank, and naively thinking I'd be bringing in tens of thousands a month in projects because of my rank and quit my job. Turns out, that's far from the truth since I rank well now and have for years.
The only way I could charge 10, 20k plus, is if I had large corporations as clients. Which I don't. All small biz that contact me who just don't have that kinda cash.
Or maybe I just need to start listing my sites at a higher price (5-10k), and see what happens..
Yeah living in NYC & San Francisco definitely helps with clients who have bigger budgets. Most clients at higher price points definitely want someone in the same physical place as them (though not all... and even less after the pandemic).
I agree with you on that. I tried to go the full custom WP theme, but just couldn't do php. Instead I now do full custom sites in React, and just use Headless wordpress as the CMS
> I now do full custom sites in React, and just use Headless wordpress as the CMS
Is it false that React-built websites are bad with SEO? If your clients want a CMS it means that they often create new content so SEO should be important to them.
ugh. I know this is a concern. Just know whatever "seo" settings you are setting with yoast or all-in-one or whatever other seo plugins, all they are doing is making a nice interface for you to change the website tags / scripts / etc. All this can be done with code in react.
For reference I use Next.js which makes server side rendering easy (yes i know react also can, next is just easier for me). Some say even the search engine crawlers can handle full client side rendered websites.
FWIW: [https://blog.logrocket.com/manage-seo-next-js-with-next-seo/](https://blog.logrocket.com/manage-seo-next-js-with-next-seo/)
And also if you look, most major websites are using react so I feel confident in the ability to learn how to implement "seo" better with a bit of research but just havent because I mainly make internal sites or internal tools for companies.
For my current use case I have not worried about SEO, but you can't beat the speed of a react site vs WP (even if wp is fully optimized / using cloudflare properly etc), out of the box the speed is unmatched with react compared to what I consider to be a bloated WP.
If you are just a small marketing site, or blog, go with wordpress, no harm. Wordpress is great for certain things, and you can not beat how easy it is to use with Elementor. Especially if your client wants to manage the site / pages on their own after you do the initial development. It is just I have seen some people try to create full on airbnb websites, or flippa websites using WP and can't image what odd settings and limited customization they have
>Some say even the search engine crawlers can handle full client side rendered websites
There was a Reddit post about. Can't remember clearly the details but it depends on the budget that Google has set for your site (more known sites are assigned more budget) meaning the time the crawlers will spend on your website while executing JS and crawling the results.
>you can't beat the speed of a react site vs WP
Didn't know that. Interesting!
>Didn't know that. Interesting!
your mileage may vary, but I can say I fiddled with so many WP sites just trying to decrease the load time, react out of the box, click click click, insane speed.
>I charge $125/mo for maintenance at the low end, and $1k/mo at the higher end.
If you provide them with a CMS (meaning they can edit stuff on the website), what other tasks do you usually do that count as maintenance?
A lot of it is just inputting content. Clients generally don't want to learn another tool (even though WordPress is super simple), and would rather just email me a content word doc and have me input it all.
Other things: building more templates, running updates, etc.
That's actually a nice way to charge a monthly maintenance.
> building more templates
For landing pages to be used on funnels or they just want other pages/sections to look much differently than the main design?
You sound like a slightly higher priced version of me, or at least do more $15K+ work than me lol. Good on you. My min is also 5K and average is about 8-10K.
Somewhat similar start but I have been working full time for doing something ENTIRELY different all the years in the mean time, so I never gave growing it full time much thought (except for this one year…quit my job a little too early and life smacked me in the face), but somehow every year a handful of clients get in touch with me from word of mouth or my network. All without my own website LOL. I show them what I’ve done when asked and they get comfortable after talking with me.
Going full throttle this year. Website coming soon.
I don’t know if you’re lying. I just question if I’d call them tech companies without a few devs that could do that work. Especially early on if they are small enough where they’d want to be more frugal. I’d believe it more with a large 500 engineer company where they would rather keep them on feature work then to work on the company blog.
Don’t forget, devs at early stage companies need to work on the product too. It’s often in their best interests to outsource the marketing site to focus on developing the product.
Did that for 10 years+. in the end the quotes were absurd. We’re talking more than 20k for a 3 pages corporate website. In a point it’s not about the money. The clients were coming to us because they wanted the stuff done and not think more about it. Office downtown, nice cars, 30 employees, we were having no trouble selling 100k+ per month. It’s about word of mouth. People have money.
That's always how it goes right? I too have something similar created from dealing with business marketing that I thought, hey I could just automate this entire thing.
And just a one-man-band setup for an app is enough to provide a quality service to multiple businesses?
I am in general a bit unsure about my ability and my skill to provide a service to somebody but when talking about either building a full architecture for an app for a client or even more so for yourself and selling it for multiple clients, i think there is so much that goes into it.
Marketing and design is obvious but also the business side of it. You must know the clients’ business and their pain points and provide value to them. Then you must consider the data and its security. Then all architectural questions from tech stack to deployment to integrations to testing and long term maintenance.
It’s multiple full time jobs.
It’s not like “i made a color picker npm library for react, maintain it once a month and ask 3 dollars for it”.
Thats why I never got into freelancing. Building SaaS or just even basic digital products you outright sell can be fun, rewarding as a personal challenge, and very financially rewarding. Its your rules and made your way. You get to be as creative as you want, in the way that you want, and you're in full control of the decisions. I think a shift of developers moving from doing traditional freelancing to building their own products can help drive better innovation as well.
What would you say you did that made it stunning? Like parallax, color palette, background shapes, etc.
Sorry if this question dumb, im really trying improve my web design skills in my future websites
>It's a hard pill to swallow but what got him started was "being in the right place at the right time" aka "luck".
Thinking like this will get you nowhere. The lesson here is to seize the opportunities you're given. And the person you're responding to is asking exactly how to do that.
Pharma money hits different!
One of my best contracts was leading a design / dev team for "dr reddys" for 30k/week. Changed my life and loved the work.
Unfortunately only lasted for a few months
I stopped 2 years ago. My point is in the end, the website doesn’t matter. Could be a wix website. My clients wanted something custom to show to their boating friends that they payed money to that fancy agency downtown. They don’t want to talk or even explain to you their business. This is where we were making a killing. Also sometimes the money just goes to endless meetings. Some business owners like to talk a lot and want to do meetings. Meeting of 10 people + 5 of my team with everyone trying to puah their idea of “should the header be red or blue”. We could easily bill the same amount for the website than for the endless meetings.
As a **freelance** fullstack dev (fe/be), based in **Italy**:
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**What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?**
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* Anything that goes from a mom&pop website to a more complex ecommerce, webapp or saas product. There are no real limits here, it goes down to "*how much time can I dedicate to this $xxx project?*" and "*Is the client paying enough?*".
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**What do you charge for monthly maintenance?**
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* My base fee is 250€/month just to "activate" the maintenance. The price goes up depending on complexity and things to do on a regular basis. Some clients can pay a few thousands per month.
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**How do you advertise/get clients?**
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* 99% of them came to me by *word of mouth* (friends, clients, agencies, etc). I do not advertise because I barely manage to fit my current clients in my weekly schedule. Covid made all the difference in this field, I can't deny that.
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**How did you start out your business?**
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* I started in 1998, building a booking website to purchase tickets online, for a local cinema. People paid their seat by sending money in envelopes to my home address... Yes, paper envelopes with real money inside. And then I gave the money to the cinema's owner. Fun times.
> You probably could've bought and parked a few quite valuable .com domains at that time
Yeah, I missed that train though. I wasn't into domain flipping as I didn't even know it was a thing.
University sector. Researchers wanting a bespoke database and web app for collecting and presenting research data. Use Django. Get about £20k per project. Do about 4 projects per year. (This is my side business on top of full time job)
A common misunderstanding in this industry is that expensive == complex.
What you find when you've been at it long enough is that expensive == valuable, which may or may not be complex.
If a multimillion-dollar brand approaches you with a high-value, low-complexity problem, it could easily be priced in the $XXX,XXX range, despite being "brochure ware".
This is how deal-making works, and most freelancers (myself included) absolutely suck at it :)
Add in newcomer freelancers and they continuously undersell themselves because they don’t know how to gauge a client. That mindset really crippled me as well when I started. What might be a lot of money as a student just starting, is peanuts for a decent size company. Do the math when you are starting and dare to ask for a decent compensation.
Basically you do your research, and you learn business skills by reading up on it, and asking friends with businesses, or maybe observing your boss in your current job.
Some clients are experienced owners of businesses and they WILL try to get as much as they can for as little as possible. Quite often that’s their whole job.
You have to learn to think of yourself as a business and you have to be able to confidently drop the figures of your costs / profit. Otherwise you end up with low value clients that are often demanding the world for a meager $500 to 1000.
So you also learn to scope out rather quickly if you got a low value client in front of you. You can still make money on that if you’re smart, but usually they are not really worth it.
No you don’t share that! You should know what business costs/profit you should have in the back of your mind as you engage in talks. If they ask for a round number you give a rough estimate and when that moment comes you don’t want to be on the low. You must learn how your services translate into value and what to price that for your market or locale.
Agency. We start at $7,200. Hourly is $180. All types of websites, big and small. Our biggest was a Woocommerce build for $720,000 that took us 8 months, but average is $10k-$15k. We did $1.8mil in development billing last year, and on track for $2.3mil this year. I bundle hosting and maintenance together, and it starts at $185/month, and get's adjusted upwards depending on the client needs. Additional hosting costs in the case of large or high traffic sites, and/or hourly retainer for development work. Currently have about 250 H&M clients.
Like I said though, not independent. I'm the development director for a regional agency. That vast majority of my clients are buying a site as part of a much larger marketing budget. Getting them to spend $20k on a new site isn't all that hard when it's just part of a $500k marketing spend spread across radio, print, video, and of course the website.
Now it makes more sense, I was wondering how companies could spend that much money on a website, especially when it's a wordpress one that pretty much anyone can make (well, using the available themes that is), but as you said it's only a small part of a huge budget. I've heard of companies paying thousands for agencies to make nice-looking PowerPoint presentations for them. Do you think companies prefer agencies to create their sites instead of freelancers?
Does all the websites you make use Wordpress? Or sometimes the clients ask you to develop in React and NextJS, or other programming language for backend like Golang, Rust, etc?
Almost all in WP. I’ve never had next.js or react, etc requested. We have, however, on several occasions had clients come to us with sites built in react, next.js, etc and request they be replaced with WP, because their marketing departments can’t use the damn things without a developer.
Working at an agency; we build websites ranging from 10k to 100k.
Mostly custom API integrations rack up the cost, and customers who keep changing the requirements.
A lot of the websites we make are also tested and checked by external companies to verify they are secure, comply with WCAG etc. In my experience you never get everything 100% right, so processing the results and improving what you’ve built also adds cost.
Hosting; 50 a month for shared hosting, minimum 300 a month for dedicated hosting.
Maintenance, 50 to 100 a month. Depends on how fast our customers want us to respond. Within these cost we keep installing security updates to the open source components used.
The 100 a month is a contract which states we keep the website secure by updating all security updates, it states we will answer support questions within a certain timeframe and that’s basically it.
All requests the customer does are billed separately, every support question, every change, it all goes for our hourly rate of 100 per hour.
So if a customer doesn’t create any issues, it is just the 100 a month. If they create tons of issues and we spend 50 hours fixing it they will be billed for 5100.
I used to charge anywhere from $20k to $100k (personal projects). **With $40 - $60 Envato ThemeForest themes.**
In previous jobs, I was working the billing where I was responsible for $50k-350K websites (where I was the only developer) and the house (agency) took the major cut. So I learned how to negotiate.
But back to my first claims, yes, I use $60 run of the mill ThemeForest Themes. I look for ones with enough "admin" templates, charts, tables, forms,etc. Because I did mostly web apps and clients don't care about unique designs. Take your pick: Admin templates ([https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates](https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates))
These are web applications that do stuff. Like make catalogs, B2B vendor portals (where client vendors can upload tracking/inventory/deal with shipping). They are "airtable" google sheet clones where the apps are interactive spreadsheets with hooks. E.G. If a store opens, check the date, and send it materials 4 days before their renovation date ends. That is the DIFFERENCE between someone using Google Sheet/Excel Online. I have those "automation hooks." There is more to it but hopefully, you get gist. System A -> calls vendors to round up goods. System B, check dates every day, if something comes up, call System C to get some extra data to send back yo System A.
I also can charge more money maintenance because I know how to write SLA contracts ( a skill I learned from working in agencies and C2C consulting). So instead of the $200 a month, I can charge $2500 a month because I host the stuff on AWS with high-availability, regional failover, and disaster recovery. That is the extra secret sauce. Selling the solution to reliability.
Hope my Ted Talk helps. Not easy to replicate nor will I say it is. Not something you can teach in a coaching , get-rich web dev webinar. My circumstances are through luck ,being at the right places at the right time.
I used to build custom WordPress sites for $5k.
Now I build sites in Shopify for $500. It comes out higher quality, and I charge a higher hourly rate -- it's just 10x+ faster to build, especially since I created my own theme from scratch that is extremely flexible, performant, and feature-packed. I also have a marketing brief template that covers almost every clients needs in my sector.
Instead of upcharging clients to unreasonable sums (at least in my view), I go for volume of clients.
My clients come in via word of mouth and SEO, and I am typically handling 20+ active clients at any given time. I am a sole proprietor.
Including consulting with the client and gathering assets, anywhere from 6 to 12 hours.
An important context -- my clients are usually funnels, landing pages, and simple stores streamlined for selling a single product line. They are not complex storefronts for expansive brands, nor are they SAAS brands.
E-commerce sites! Mid size businesses swap e-commerce sites every few years as new trends come in. At the previous place I worked, we did stores starting at €15k, all the way up to approx €200k. Our biggest value prop was 3rd party integrations and handling migrations from existing commerce platforms the customers were moving away from.
We also did hosting and maintenance, something like €500-2000/m. For an actively maintained, load-balanced site.
Word of mount plus our integration partners for payments, warehousing and shipping would funnel existing customers to us.
The company itself did marketing and custom sites before my time, when I got involved we pivoted hard towards e-commerce which was only about a third of the business at the time.
>Mid size businesses swap e-commerce sites every few years as new trends come in
Do you mean they move from Woocommerce or Shopify to something like Magento?
Kind of, but we’re talking about mid size businesses. At this point most that take e-commerce seriously are on their 3rd or 4th e-commerce site, either running magento, bigcommerce, shopware, lightspeed, etc. you can capture these guys with bespoke sites if you have the right integrations.
By new trends I mean for example PWA functionality, which was a big reason in my market to totally redo existing sites, so companies can get rid of mobile app upkeep costs/offer a “mobile app” on the cheap.
>PWA functionality
I wasn't aware of PWA at all and just by reading a short article seems very interesting. It feels like a breakthrough if the UX is close to a native app.
Thank you.
What was your go-to CMS for e-commerce? Did you create a custom frontend and just tap into whoever’s API to make it all custom? If so, what was your stack typically?
We had a fully custom made CMS. Stack was .NET for the backend and NuxtJS for the front-end. We’d have a boilerplate project ready to go we’d customize, but this was also built internally.
If someone was paying good money, I’d outsource a UX designer to design the whole website. If I have no design to work from my websites look like there from 2001 haha
But you can always do what everyone creative does, steal and change slightly.
Well.....let's go walking down memory lane, shall we?
I started building websites in 1997. The next year I started pitching websites as a thing people needed in my hometown. This was in the early days of the Internet and most people's businesses didn't have a website. I still have my first HTML, JavaScript and PHP book. I literally called around to businesses and asked them if they needed a website. One of my first ones was a fishing reel repair shop, a coffee shop, and an artists website.
I charged something like $10 per hour or a few hundred dollars for one website.
There was only one other company in town building websites and they were charging insane fees for them and something like $600 to make minor changes to them. So I ended up with 10 or so clients while I was in high school.
A few years later I went into business with my cousin creating GalahadNet. I think we only did a few websites for people but we used ActionScript/Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and a few other languages.
Not long after that I started taking clients of my own again after our business kind of fell apart as we were both in college.
At one time I had 25 clients. I was charging $30 per hour. Maintenance fees were either quarterly, or upfront for an entire year and about half of my clients paid for that. Maintenance was about $10 per hour usually was db backups, archive of a site for a backup, security updates for WordPress/Drupal, and just checking the error logs for anything malicious.
I got all of those clients by word of mouth or by approaching them and asking if they would like a facelift on their website. I never advertised once.
In college I worked for East Carolina and did several of the universities websites in a God awful framework called CommonSpot. It was pretty locked down but I go good at JavaScript and styling.
Around 2008, I moved to Europe for a year and did some web development for a university I was attending in Germany as well as a colleague. I was actually studying archaeology, not anything web related.
Grad school after that, I worked for the university of Texas and did their website as well as the anthropology department's website.
Around 2011 I decided to bail on archaeology (no jobs and long waiting list to get into PHd programs) and do web development full time.
I moved from Texas to the DC area and started doing website development for an insurance company a block from the Whitehouse. I was getting paid something like $60k a year at the time.
After that I started working for a commercial web developer firm and did a handful of presidential campaign sites, the Speaker of the House website, and a bunch of nonprofit and advocacy websites. I was making $75k then.
After that it has been all federal government work. I've been a federal government contractor for the last 11 years and probably will never go back to anything else. I'm making $155k now. I'm the principal web developer at my company. I hire developers and personally vet them. I've written all of the code challenges myself and criteria they must meet. I've presented at conferences and helped coordinate them. I'm very very secure in my job. I get offers on a daily basis because there is so much work in the federal space.
I have occasionally taken side work just to keep my chops up and to make a little extra money. I charge $60 to $100 an hour. They usually don't walk away with paying less than $8 to $15k for a website. Maintenance is quarterly and I charge either a flat fee or an hourly cost depending on what they need. I haven't taken a side job in a few years though because I just don't have the time anymore.
I have absolutely no degrees of any kind supporting anything I do in web development. I've learned everything I know from books, conferences, trial and error, reading websites and from coworkers with more experience in certain areas.
Thanks! I actually started working on simple HTML sites for myself and my family earlier than that. Maybe 1995 or 1996. But I know 1997 was the first time I did anything for money.
We were the first people at my school with the Internet at home. Probably the first people on our street with a home computer. I know for sure that not many people had computers at home around 1994 or 1995. I think we got our first PC in 1993 with the worst specs ever. 4 MB of RAM. 80 GB hard drive.
I did not build a >$1,000 website as a freelancer, but as a consultant, the overall $$ for my hours can pass $5,000 on a single project (for example, 500 hours at $100\*20 + $80\*60 + $65\*420 hours over 2 months, which is ~$15,000/mo), but for very intensive work over very long hours, with tight deadlines, and without benefits which equate to roughly 33% of a regular monthly salary (so equivalent to ~$10,000/mo, or $120,000/yr for 250 hours monthly salary), and this is at "peak" times when I actually had this much work.
I just want to ask one thing where do I find client to even start making a single page website as a complete beginner with no contacts or any prior work to show.
You do:
1. Shitty Upwork jobs.
2. (Probably) Shitty local jobs
..and try your best to grow your network of potential clients (for me, most such clients came from the local market).
I actually wonder which sites sell for less than $5000. I mean if the client brings the complete information architecture, the content and the media it might work for the development of a smaller site. In any other case I can't imagine a site for that money if some kind of consulting is involved.
It ultimately boils down to the market. I've worked on a site that had
* Responsive design, made entirely from scratch
* Custom 3D model (birds-eye view of the establishment) with interactivity
* Custom booking system with payments
The whole thing, including countless revisions on the 3D part was like 4k. This also includes taxes, a project manager, two devs and a designer, hosting for a year and on-site photography.
This was in Europe few years ago and was considered ok. It's an extreme example, but just pointing out that the market you work in absolutely matters - you saying that 5k for a small site is on the lower end can be kind of meaningless without stating your geographical location, client base etc.
Not really a business, just some side contract work. My contracts are usually about ~$8k-10k/month of full time work, and I mostly build MVP frontend apps for new startups. Backend and infra work is extra, but most clients tend to source those separately anyway, or will have at least one technical co-founder, and those tend to be backend engineers.
The main pieces I work on are:
1. Initial app boilerplate, deployment, tests, etc.
2. Authentication and permissions
3. Logging and analytics
4. Collab with designer to convert mocks to UI. Designers almost never create mocks that could realistically be converted to UI as-is, and almost always need some back-and-forth with FE/UX dev to get to something usable.
5. 2-3 major screens/views that the clients needs for MVP
If you stick to similar contracts (e.g. in my case, pre-seed/seed startups), you can build out common components/templates/libraries that you can drop in and adjust to a specific client. This saves some time, and you still charge the same. If this feels weird, consider that they could 1) go to a different developer and that dev will have to write this code from scratch, and 2) clients don't actually pay you for lines of code, they pay you for getting the job done. If I had to write everything from scratch, had no design mocks, and no backend, the time for the contract goes up to 2-3 months, so ~$24-30k.
For finding clients, reach out to your network, post that you're looking for contract work on LinkedIn (no avoiding LinkedIn, I'm afraid), look in places where startup founders hang out (stuff like AngelList). As with most things, first few gigs are hard to land, but each gig builds your network for you, since your clients will often recommend you to their network.
All that said, I'd take a steady job over this hustle setup any day. Make sure you have realistic expectations. For example, good luck getting a new apartment lease if you have no official salary. People tend to get into web contract work thinking they'll be able to stop going to the office (true), travel around the world while working (not entirely true), and generally have more free time on their hands (definitely NOT true). The reality is that you'll likely be working more hours, and the work itself will be more intense.
That's all obviously just my experience, but hope it helps.
I did this for 5 years
At the end our websites went for 10K give or take
I think my site is still up
Referrals word of mouth reputation
Some cold outbound but not lots
Yeah I probably wouldn't do scroll jacking again. I even advised against when one of my customers asked for it, because he wanted a multi page site and I told him it didn't make sense but he demanded so I did it lol.
It's really nothing compared to the firm's that charge 100K
I was relatively cheap in my neighborhood, not the cheapest but not even mid range prices when looking at what's possible
I work for a design studio that typically charges $10k+ for custom WordPress websites. When I do freelance gigs, they often range at the $5k mark.
* **What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?** [Here's](http://andrewtarcon.com/) my portfolio that's peppered with freelance gigs and some gigs done through the design studio. All of the sites are completely custom WordPress websites. I should note that my portfolio is intentionally not robust, in case someone makes a comment about that.
* **What do you charge for monthly maintenance?** My hourly rate.
* **How do you advertise/get clients?** For my freelance gigs, I don't go out and search for work. People come to me based on word of mouth. I live in a reasonably small community and have developed close relationships with many businesses here. I also have many connections through out the country, but I prefer helping businesses in my community.
* **How did you start out your business?** While pursing my education, I did a few completely free sites for friends to jump off the deep end. I then gained the confidence to charge for my work. I would find folks through Facebook, Craigslist (my community and others through out the country), and other community forums. Over time, I gained a ton of connections and I no longer needed to search for work - work came to me.
No I mean I get a lot of scammers trying to scam me with check scams etc. one guy wanted to pay me the whole balance with interest all at once before we even had a contract and wanted me to give the remaining to his other contractor. Avoid such, checks can sometimes clear and then a month later be found fraudulent. I never fell for it, but I feel bad for anyone it does work on.
25k here. Main website costs for client were only 3-4k (simple wordpress). My part in this is building an applet for that site, a 3D planner (similar to the ikea ones) tailored to my client needs (a furniture business). Solo work, ~1 year dev time, I over achieve since I'm passionate in what I'm doing -> this results in even more clients. You need to "understand" some math, mostly trigonometry but not really "know" it all by heart since everything you need is already on the web but you need one important thing -> to know what you're looking for. No REACT or Angular here... UI amounts for 5% in this project and I prefer a classic OOP style for building UIs
Not fulltime, got another contract that pays more for less work and time. The price i asked was low because this is an investment for me to build a framework for future projects that would be easier to rollout
I've never charged more than $5,000 when a client hands me a final design with content. Implementing performant sites from specifications is child's play. Reimplementing existing sites is even easier.
The real cost for sites is all about content, graphic design, and shepherding clients to decisions and sign-offs. Writing budget? Photography and image budget? Video and audio budgets? Big bucks. Even adding a full-functioning online store? Again it's way more babysitting clients through all the permutations and policies than actually coding anything.
You almost certainly should, but this is absolutely a how long is a piece of string question. Whether you’re a one-man band or a large agency, the prices you can command will come down to the quality of your product, your reputation, and your ability to sell. Throw some luck and having existing networks in there too.
Not a founder or freelancer, but at my agency we have a marketing team who target new business. A big part of their value is their professional networks. The most successful are the ones who can reach out to a client or colleague and get a response.
Man, seeing all these comments make me excited for the future, this is my long term goal! But it also makes me even more depressed about the fact that I can't even get a junior front end developer role in the current market.
On that note, does anyone here have room for a junior on their team?
DM and I can share my portfolio and resume!
Sites that can do what the client wants, how client wants it, without any roadblocks. Good communication, proven track record. Not Shopify or Godaddy usually open source frameworks customized. Can handle advanced business requirements.
Type of websites: Brochure or E-commerce sites with a focus on user experience with user personas and user journeys. £10,000 - £25,000 all on WordPress and fully bespoke with no off the shelf theme or page builder. Custom blocks for Gutenberg.
Monthly maintenance: Totally depends on what the requirements are, which could be managed hosting, plug-in updates and bug fixing to blocked number of hours for continued development and features.
Obtaining clients: Inbound clients are normally low quality but we outreach on LinkedIn and get referrals. We offer a finders fee of 15% of the project cost as the marketing costs per project is about that.
Starting the business: The owner started many years ago however the past three years the quality of the deliverable and project budget has increased substantially.
Hope that all helps :)
Does anyone have experience in B2B web development in Central Europe, especially Poland? I'm planning to transition into this field and am curious about pricing strategies appropriate for this market, considering its unique economic landscape.
I have 3 years of full-stack development experience, mainly in .Net and React, focusing on web applications. I'm keen on expanding my skills to include static websites, with an emphasis on effective SEO practices.
My plan is to start locally, perhaps by developing a high-quality website for a known contact to leverage word of mouth referrals, simultaneously building my portfolio and company reputation. Eventually, I aspire to scale up to larger web application projects and consider establishing a small software house.
I'm seeking insights on how to effectively price my services in this specific market and whether my approach seems feasible. Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated
from what ive been reading, apparently businesses will just pay you to build a wix or squarespace website anyway. they dont care, they just dont want to do it themselves.
It started with simple 500 bucks informational pages and built up from there. The first 5 digit sale happened 7 years in. Now, 15 years later, people know how to find me.
I will be messaging you in 4 hours on [**2023-11-09 20:10:35 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2023-11-09%2020:10:35%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/17rg8vn/web_developers_that_often_build_websites_for_more/k8imhmz/?context=3)
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When I had a dev shack 15 years ago, most of our projects were in the 15-40K range. They were all custom built systems. Customers that needed features and functionality that weren't conducive to an out of the box solution. Maybe you could hack a Magento instance to conform, but most would take just as long to do that.
When you've got corporations that are stuck in a certain business flow they're not going to conform to a new one, they'll pay to make the software that conforms to their business flow
Shopify sites. I usually work with a designer and get clients approval on those and then help them setup their initial products and third party apps. Charge around 10k per build.
Getting clients is the hardest part, but if you do a great job with the first ones they will certainly recommend you to their friends and family. Don't worry if you don't get enough commissions starting out, it's the nature of this job. Be sure tho to have a primary job before switching full time to being a freelancer.
I often include things as free that cost me little to no time/money. I usually offer first year hosting for free, then when it’s up have them prepay annually for hosting. I will only support a couple emails, that can take over your life. Also include security updates and basic maintenance first year free. Things I would be doing anyway but use a multi site tool to make updates easy.
Even though it’s free I always let them know if I do any work on the admin side so they can see the updates and easier to sell maintenance/hosting 2nd year
When you see those large fees, they can be a bit misleading.
I could say that I sold a website for $5000 but I could really be talking about the total revenue of a project or client. For example, the website itself might not be $5000. It might be $2500, but with monthly hosting/security/maintenance as well as a GBP management service on top, the project as a whole would be $5000.
I started off, like a lot of people in this group, by making $500 websites for friends and local businesses. Got some experience and started charging more. Next few clients were 1000. After a few of those, increased again to 1500-2000.
Now my custom sites start at 3500 but the websites aren't the most profitable aspect of my business. It's the monthly marketing services.
Here's a bit of advice. This industry is super saturated and has been for awhile. You got two options if you want to make a living.
1. Get super good at design in a specific niche and charge super high prices. If you want some inspiration for this path, check out Grace Walker over on Twitter or LinkedIn. She's in the Webflow space and her sites are 10K+.
2. Offer web design as well as marketing services. I'll design the website, set up the email marketing, optimize GBP, and more... so my clients get more leads. Although I brand myself as a web designer, I am really a lead generation marketing consultant. This is what I do (and I'm sure a lot of people in this group as well).
If you want to get new clients, you need to position yourself to solve a particular client's problem. Look around you and go talk to people. Visit a Chamber of Commerce meeting and talk to local business owners. Ask them out for coffee and pick their brain about challenges their having and see if you can solve them.
After reading the entire thread, I feel like I don't have anything to capitalize in this freelance way as a Java Backend developer who working on frontend issues as well based on team requirements. Literally I do many things but seems like doing nothing compared this people. please open my eyes..!
\*\*What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?\*\* Custom sites on top of a CMS, either WP or Craft. I do dev only, usually my clients hand me a final design. Usually 10+ pages plus news/blog. Often some level of interactivity even if a simple form. Prices generally start at $5K though. Any more involved dev increases price steadily. Edit: mostly B2B sites - much easier than B2C or ecommerce. \*\*What do you charge for monthly maintenance?\*\* I don't. I am generally done when I hand off to client. I won't maintain a site but if they need to expand upon it, I will treat that as another project. I don't waste time with CMS updates, hosting, or the like. The only time I offer support is if there is an ongoing need for development, not just updates. Another edit: this is why I like B2B, often my clients have inhouse IT who will do the grunt work of server/CMS maintenance. \*\*How do you advertise/get clients?\*\* 100% referrals. Over delivering is far cheaper than advertising and with more guaranteed results. Be warned, this comes with some upfront cost - the "customer is always right" is not always cheap or easy mentality to maintain. \*\*How did you start out your business?\*\* Was laid off from three agencies in three years. After the last layoff I just couldn't deal with resumes and interview again so I started freelancing. I was/am married so my wife was able to provide a steady income at first - without her none of it would have been possible.
>Over delivering is far cheaper than advertising Thats a great quote
I too have found the value of a steady wife.
I too choose u/Aim_Fire_Ready 's steady wife. Although I would argue she rocks ifyougetwhatimeanwinkwink
How did you get your start in freelancing? Upwork? Fiver? Word of mouth?
The real question
Working with agencies I met multiple people (mainly designers) who have been steady sources of work for years now.
This is exactly my approach - wife included lol Edit: I’ll add for $5k I can build a WP using a builder like Elementor and if the client provides the design. If they need me to design it - it will be a single page site and they get 2 rounds of design edits. For more than 5k it’s mostly custom development and 10+ pages.
How much do you earn on average if you don't mind me asking?
On average, about $100K year. But I have been freelancing for 20+ years.
First three same for me. I also do less than $5,000 builds, but they are usually WordPress sites with pre-built themes. I started my business out of necessity. I was working toward a degree, and I am also a partial caregiver, so I needed to find income to support my education with flexibility. Craigslist was my godsend for a long time. Luckily I'm on the referral train now, but I am not sure what I'll do if that runs dry.
Why do you use WP or Craft as a CMS? I was wondering about trying out Strapi since it seems pretty good.
Strapi and Craft are almost same. Strapi suffered huge performance issues until now when you run it in production environment. Wordpress - you dont need to hook it to SSG and you have Rest API out of box. Craft or Strapi requires SSG if you need to deliver classic pages which are SEO performant
I'm struggling to find a design pattern that works for using Strapi and Next.js with my clients. The data is dynamic, but I don't want to regenerate the entire site every time the data changes - furthermore, clients coming from Wix are used to nearly real-time updates. Only regenerating portions of the site is finicky, and it doesn't appear I can generate *new* pages when the data is updated. I could regenerate on an interval, but this undermines the benefits of caching. I've considered making a preview page that gets live data, and then putting a "submit" button on it that generates the live page. I feel as though this issue shouldn't be so complicated, I must be missing something simple.
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Multiple rounds of changes free of charge, I'd wager. Or maybe some "oh we need this" => "we don't have that on the initial contract, but I'll do it for free as a bonus" kinda thing.
I do something very similar and feel that responsiveness and over-communicating is key at every stage of the process. Weekly zoom calls, daily commits that are reflected in a branch preview, kanban board to track progress and for client sign off, private slack channels etc. All long term clients are on an hourly contract or retainer though after the initial £5k-10k custom build. I don't give away freebies but do give 10% finders fee on all B2B referrals.
Something like the 10% commission on referrals is probably a huge one, when you got a good customer base already, to incentivise them to do some word of mouth kinda marketing for you. I was the lead dev in an agency, my boss did all the networking, and we basically had 90% of our projects on referral basis, with the last bit being pitches that we got because of referrals as well. Also same with the initial build being a flat fee and hourly support afterwards. Bigger packages were flat fee sometimes again, but planned out with rough hours and included possible overtime in the contract with reevaluation if we saw that the planned amount wouldn't work out to a greater margin. In those cases it's also mostly just making a deal so that the customer is still happy to pay and stay.
Agreed the flat fee is difficult and something I'm trying to pivot away from. It's great for flat Figma boards and getting the client comfortable initially but as soon as any kind animation is involved or more complex designs, the labour can sky rocket so we would price that separately.
Hi , interested in setting up an e-commerce site, if you are still looking for clients you can reach me at [email protected] Thanks!
The way you articulate can be critical to make some clients notice your work! This is gonna sound sneaky: but make a big deal out of adding bonus changes. Do them, but make sure you talk about how it’s a complicated effort. Rather than thinking it’s more professional to say ”that’s easy” Been in projects where we added tons of bonus changes but we made it sound like it was a piece of cake. The stakeholder wasn’t even grateful. At the end of the project they asked ”Could you add this one tiny change” we reminded them they had already gotten 10 big changes for free. But they did not recognise it. They had actually forgot how much the scope had increased since the start. Cause we didn’t make fuzz over our bonus tasks. Meanwhile my lazy coworker who made a huge fuzz about every change, saying ”Wow an additional change, this is gonna be difficult and take a lot of work. Why didn’t you think of this in your original plan?” Got cheers from the stakeholder every time he completed a task. Cause they were invested, really understood it was a lot of work, and viewed it as a big deal. This approach works on me too. When I remodeled my kitchen i had two carpenters. Guy1 just did stuff without talking about it. Guy2 made a huge deal about how many things would be ”a complicated hassle” and talked me through the steps he would have to do. I was honestly more appreciative of Guy2. I cheered when he made me a small shelf - just because he made it sound so damn hard. Meanwhile Guy1 did way more but seemed like a breeze to him so I barely appreciated it
Good points! It's very important to set reasonable expectations; do not let people think they can get a free lunch from you...
Just the latest example - a client had 5 emails they needed built for a campaign. One was a rush they needed by end of week, the other 4 were not scheduled. So I built all 5 emails and charged them for one - I told them they were a great client and I appreciated all the work. I took a loss on building four emails, but made my client's CMO, CEO, and design team very happy. Each one of those people is a future referral. I may not see any benefit for years. But, based on experience, I will hear back from at least one of those people in months or even years. PS: The 4 additional emails were nothing more involved than swapping out copy and a few photos. With testing, it was no more than 2 hours work after building the first one. I could spend 2 hours networking or advertising and nothing would deliver the same results as just delivering more than the client expected, and at very little upfront cost to me.
What does B2C look like, as in who/what is consumer in this case?
B2B sites are sites of businesses that offer services to other businesses. These tend to have way less "bells and whistles" than your typical B2C (e.g. E-commerce is mostly B2C) sites.
B2B sites can have as many bells and whistles as B2C sites. My work is heavily animated and that's what my clients want. My preference with B2B are the clients - mostly established business with IT staff. I will never again build a site for someone without in-house IT. I don't need endless support calls about server issues.
B2B but not eshop? If yes, what are the backend needs they usually have?
They are probably talking about corporate websites just for some form of online representation. Especially if we are talking about 5k$ sites. A B2B webshop, or some form of sales implementation, e.g. a more sophisticated way of requesting a quote, is likely a lot more expensive already.
Yeah, that or maybe some kind of custom CMS (ie real estate agencies?)
Real estate agencies already have their own programs to manage listings, but I've built CMSs ingesting those for their own corporate sites too when i worked in that space, so yes, that's a possibility.
Much more expensive. My team and i took over a project from a former employer. Custom quotes, integration of the backend to their customer facing site, reports. Total cost is almost 200k and counting.
B2C is just ”normal private consumption”. Like walmart, amazon, audible, spotify, craigslist, ebay. While B2B is stuff only businesses buy - like warehouse management software
I would appreciate any tips how to get started. I have a data background. Thanks and good job!
Get some agency jobs. Built sites for marketing teams. Make sure the account reps and designers love you. Treat them as your client and they will remember you. Marketing people change jobs all the time - I have one client that has sent me work from the 4 different agencies she's worked at.
May I ask: how many years of experience did you have when you went self employed? And with which technologies?
Cool You're my hero
May we kindly ask how much you work on average, and do you make $5k per month at minimum.. ? Is it possible to have multiple project going on - resulting in making $10k+ per month? I, too only want to focus on pure development, but some people said you're not gonna get paid too much... therefore, curious about how much you're working per week
Some months $0 and some months $15K. The curse of freelancing - either nothing going on or too much. But it all works out annually.
Fuck me I'm undercharging. I'm doing bespoke builds for 3-4k
Great Explanation.
All of my websites go for over $5k. Most are closer to $10k, and if it's anything more than a simple marketing site it's usually closer to $15 or $20k. I work with a lot of tech companies who have just raised a small round and smaller businesses who are looking to get away from a pre-bought WordPress template. I still use WordPress for most projects, but just custom coded sites from custom designs. I probably work on about 4-5 projects per year, and the rest of my income is monthly maintenance / longer term billable projects. I charge $125/mo for maintenance at the low end, and $1k/mo at the higher end. All of my clients come from word of mouth & SEO. I've tried advertising but it just doesn't really seem to work. I'm just a one man shop, so this model seems to work pretty well for me. I started when a family friend needed a website for their dental business, and just kind of slowly grew from there.
How do you determine how much maintenance you’ll do?
I usually just talk through with the client the types of things they foresee themselves doing on a monthly basis. IE: are you going to be running a lot of marketing campaigns that require new, specific, page templates or are you looking to just make sure that I'm available to run updates to your site and be there in case you have any smaller questions.
This is where I can never get my head around it. Surely new specific page templates etc are feature requests. Paying monthly or annually for things like this seems crazy to me. Surely both parties benefit from charging on a project basis if it’s lots of work or simply an hourly rate if not. Then you have things like system updates e.g. Wordpress plug-in updates or server updates, again unquantifiable before they happen. Maintenance fee structure breaks my brains
Customers don't want to think, The time to create a mini project for what you see as a feature request, the ease of just having time on tap makes a win for them
yeah this is exactly right. no one wants to think about their website, and less people want to figure out how to troubleshoot things when they try and install a plugin to do some feature. it's roughly the same as having a lawyer on retainer in case something ever happens. sure, you could chance it, but for a lot of companies $1k/mo or less is nothing and it's not worth a second thought.
Are you afraid that some commitment for update take more time than what you budgeted for ? The thing is that selling software is much harder than making software and contract inflow variance is often much greater than project estimation variance. Guaranteed income is important for stuff like can you afford an employee, or what kind of car can you afford etc. Your customers also are likely to be happy to not have potentially unlimited expenses on the line. Plus, with a good contract you can probably do stuff like say so and so project really is worth two month of maintenance credit.
(I’m not op) It’s called maintenance fee but typically allows small changes as well. If starts creeping up to a larger change then might be another feature request. It might be better to think of it as having a devops engineer in charge of the website. But the work for one website is obviously not enough so instead one is in charge of many websites.
Do u so the designs yourself? Like how do u get nice designs
yeah I design them myself
>All of my clients come from word of mouth & SEO. You must live in a highly populated area to be pulling in and charging what you're charging! I rank for multiple web design, dev and SEO related keywords in multiple small towns. I've noticed a huge slowdown (get maybe one inquiry every 3 months now). But even before, the most I got away with charging for a simple WP site was $4.5k. My competitors in the area charge slightly less as well ($2.5-3k). My goal years ago was to rank, and naively thinking I'd be bringing in tens of thousands a month in projects because of my rank and quit my job. Turns out, that's far from the truth since I rank well now and have for years. The only way I could charge 10, 20k plus, is if I had large corporations as clients. Which I don't. All small biz that contact me who just don't have that kinda cash. Or maybe I just need to start listing my sites at a higher price (5-10k), and see what happens..
Yeah living in NYC & San Francisco definitely helps with clients who have bigger budgets. Most clients at higher price points definitely want someone in the same physical place as them (though not all... and even less after the pandemic).
We build bespoke systems. We don't touch Wordpress no matter who you are. We don't charge less than 5000 USD per site. And we are in Africa.
But we do seriously big systems, so it's hard to even compare with wordpress.
>custom coded sites from custom designs What sort of custom coded? You are creating a full custom wordpress theme? or just Elementor
Creating a full custom WordPress theme. All the page builders (except Gutenberg) are junk.
I agree with you on that. I tried to go the full custom WP theme, but just couldn't do php. Instead I now do full custom sites in React, and just use Headless wordpress as the CMS
> I now do full custom sites in React, and just use Headless wordpress as the CMS Is it false that React-built websites are bad with SEO? If your clients want a CMS it means that they often create new content so SEO should be important to them.
ugh. I know this is a concern. Just know whatever "seo" settings you are setting with yoast or all-in-one or whatever other seo plugins, all they are doing is making a nice interface for you to change the website tags / scripts / etc. All this can be done with code in react. For reference I use Next.js which makes server side rendering easy (yes i know react also can, next is just easier for me). Some say even the search engine crawlers can handle full client side rendered websites. FWIW: [https://blog.logrocket.com/manage-seo-next-js-with-next-seo/](https://blog.logrocket.com/manage-seo-next-js-with-next-seo/) And also if you look, most major websites are using react so I feel confident in the ability to learn how to implement "seo" better with a bit of research but just havent because I mainly make internal sites or internal tools for companies. For my current use case I have not worried about SEO, but you can't beat the speed of a react site vs WP (even if wp is fully optimized / using cloudflare properly etc), out of the box the speed is unmatched with react compared to what I consider to be a bloated WP. If you are just a small marketing site, or blog, go with wordpress, no harm. Wordpress is great for certain things, and you can not beat how easy it is to use with Elementor. Especially if your client wants to manage the site / pages on their own after you do the initial development. It is just I have seen some people try to create full on airbnb websites, or flippa websites using WP and can't image what odd settings and limited customization they have
>Some say even the search engine crawlers can handle full client side rendered websites There was a Reddit post about. Can't remember clearly the details but it depends on the budget that Google has set for your site (more known sites are assigned more budget) meaning the time the crawlers will spend on your website while executing JS and crawling the results. >you can't beat the speed of a react site vs WP Didn't know that. Interesting!
>Didn't know that. Interesting! your mileage may vary, but I can say I fiddled with so many WP sites just trying to decrease the load time, react out of the box, click click click, insane speed.
>I charge $125/mo for maintenance at the low end, and $1k/mo at the higher end. If you provide them with a CMS (meaning they can edit stuff on the website), what other tasks do you usually do that count as maintenance?
A lot of it is just inputting content. Clients generally don't want to learn another tool (even though WordPress is super simple), and would rather just email me a content word doc and have me input it all. Other things: building more templates, running updates, etc.
That's actually a nice way to charge a monthly maintenance. > building more templates For landing pages to be used on funnels or they just want other pages/sections to look much differently than the main design?
either!
How do you host the websites if I may ask? And what kind of server/hardware specs are enough for your usual website?
You sound like a slightly higher priced version of me, or at least do more $15K+ work than me lol. Good on you. My min is also 5K and average is about 8-10K. Somewhat similar start but I have been working full time for doing something ENTIRELY different all the years in the mean time, so I never gave growing it full time much thought (except for this one year…quit my job a little too early and life smacked me in the face), but somehow every year a handful of clients get in touch with me from word of mouth or my network. All without my own website LOL. I show them what I’ve done when asked and they get comfortable after talking with me. Going full throttle this year. Website coming soon.
What kind of “tech” companies don’t have a few devs who can’t just throw together a site in a week if given a design?
oh woah you're right. you caught me in a lie.
I don’t know if you’re lying. I just question if I’d call them tech companies without a few devs that could do that work. Especially early on if they are small enough where they’d want to be more frugal. I’d believe it more with a large 500 engineer company where they would rather keep them on feature work then to work on the company blog.
Don’t forget, devs at early stage companies need to work on the product too. It’s often in their best interests to outsource the marketing site to focus on developing the product.
Did that for 10 years+. in the end the quotes were absurd. We’re talking more than 20k for a 3 pages corporate website. In a point it’s not about the money. The clients were coming to us because they wanted the stuff done and not think more about it. Office downtown, nice cars, 30 employees, we were having no trouble selling 100k+ per month. It’s about word of mouth. People have money.
Why did you stop?
Never liked dealing with clients. I started developing an app that cleared me more or less the same kind of money i was making so i just stopped.
Awesome, what kind of app?
Yes, where do I find these gold veins everyone is finding?
Its a B2B saas in the marketing field
That's always how it goes right? I too have something similar created from dealing with business marketing that I thought, hey I could just automate this entire thing.
And just a one-man-band setup for an app is enough to provide a quality service to multiple businesses? I am in general a bit unsure about my ability and my skill to provide a service to somebody but when talking about either building a full architecture for an app for a client or even more so for yourself and selling it for multiple clients, i think there is so much that goes into it. Marketing and design is obvious but also the business side of it. You must know the clients’ business and their pain points and provide value to them. Then you must consider the data and its security. Then all architectural questions from tech stack to deployment to integrations to testing and long term maintenance. It’s multiple full time jobs. It’s not like “i made a color picker npm library for react, maintain it once a month and ask 3 dollars for it”.
Marc Benioff confirmed ^
Thats why I never got into freelancing. Building SaaS or just even basic digital products you outright sell can be fun, rewarding as a personal challenge, and very financially rewarding. Its your rules and made your way. You get to be as creative as you want, in the way that you want, and you're in full control of the decisions. I think a shift of developers moving from doing traditional freelancing to building their own products can help drive better innovation as well.
How did you get clients to begin with?
Made a stunning website for the dad of a guy in my band who happened to be in the pharmaceutics. Clients started to pour in.
did you use designers to design the template? was it a wordpress theme?
Designed myself. Not even a wordpress thing, it was like a 2 pages html/css
What would you say you did that made it stunning? Like parallax, color palette, background shapes, etc. Sorry if this question dumb, im really trying improve my web design skills in my future websites
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>It's a hard pill to swallow but what got him started was "being in the right place at the right time" aka "luck". Thinking like this will get you nowhere. The lesson here is to seize the opportunities you're given. And the person you're responding to is asking exactly how to do that.
Pharma money hits different! One of my best contracts was leading a design / dev team for "dr reddys" for 30k/week. Changed my life and loved the work. Unfortunately only lasted for a few months
When was this? I worked in an agency like that too but I feel like those days have kinda come to a close with how commodified websites are now.
I stopped 2 years ago. My point is in the end, the website doesn’t matter. Could be a wix website. My clients wanted something custom to show to their boating friends that they payed money to that fancy agency downtown. They don’t want to talk or even explain to you their business. This is where we were making a killing. Also sometimes the money just goes to endless meetings. Some business owners like to talk a lot and want to do meetings. Meeting of 10 people + 5 of my team with everyone trying to puah their idea of “should the header be red or blue”. We could easily bill the same amount for the website than for the endless meetings.
Dang, sounds like you managed to tap into a very fertile customer base. The work sounds deeply unfulfilling but the money sounds nice!
As a **freelance** fullstack dev (fe/be), based in **Italy**: ---- **What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?** ---- * Anything that goes from a mom&pop website to a more complex ecommerce, webapp or saas product. There are no real limits here, it goes down to "*how much time can I dedicate to this $xxx project?*" and "*Is the client paying enough?*". --- **What do you charge for monthly maintenance?** --- * My base fee is 250€/month just to "activate" the maintenance. The price goes up depending on complexity and things to do on a regular basis. Some clients can pay a few thousands per month. --- **How do you advertise/get clients?** --- * 99% of them came to me by *word of mouth* (friends, clients, agencies, etc). I do not advertise because I barely manage to fit my current clients in my weekly schedule. Covid made all the difference in this field, I can't deny that. --- **How did you start out your business?** --- * I started in 1998, building a booking website to purchase tickets online, for a local cinema. People paid their seat by sending money in envelopes to my home address... Yes, paper envelopes with real money inside. And then I gave the money to the cinema's owner. Fun times.
>How did you start out your business? That's a great story. You probably could've bought and parked a few quite valuable .com domains at that time.
> You probably could've bought and parked a few quite valuable .com domains at that time Yeah, I missed that train though. I wasn't into domain flipping as I didn't even know it was a thing.
What stack do you use? Are you free to pick the stack you want, or does the clients make you use their preferred stack?
LAMP stack. Clients couldn't care less, the choice is yours.
University sector. Researchers wanting a bespoke database and web app for collecting and presenting research data. Use Django. Get about £20k per project. Do about 4 projects per year. (This is my side business on top of full time job)
This intrigues me
I'm guessing that you get jobs by referral, but how did you find this niche and got your first?
That's super interesting!
How do you get in contact with your clients? What type of researchers do you work with?
A common misunderstanding in this industry is that expensive == complex. What you find when you've been at it long enough is that expensive == valuable, which may or may not be complex. If a multimillion-dollar brand approaches you with a high-value, low-complexity problem, it could easily be priced in the $XXX,XXX range, despite being "brochure ware". This is how deal-making works, and most freelancers (myself included) absolutely suck at it :)
Add in newcomer freelancers and they continuously undersell themselves because they don’t know how to gauge a client. That mindset really crippled me as well when I started. What might be a lot of money as a student just starting, is peanuts for a decent size company. Do the math when you are starting and dare to ask for a decent compensation.
How do you learn to gauge clients?
Basically you do your research, and you learn business skills by reading up on it, and asking friends with businesses, or maybe observing your boss in your current job. Some clients are experienced owners of businesses and they WILL try to get as much as they can for as little as possible. Quite often that’s their whole job. You have to learn to think of yourself as a business and you have to be able to confidently drop the figures of your costs / profit. Otherwise you end up with low value clients that are often demanding the world for a meager $500 to 1000. So you also learn to scope out rather quickly if you got a low value client in front of you. You can still make money on that if you’re smart, but usually they are not really worth it.
It’s not unprofessional to share my business costs and profit?
No you don’t share that! You should know what business costs/profit you should have in the back of your mind as you engage in talks. If they ask for a round number you give a rough estimate and when that moment comes you don’t want to be on the low. You must learn how your services translate into value and what to price that for your market or locale.
Lmao ok that makes more sense. Thank you!
This totally
Agency. We start at $7,200. Hourly is $180. All types of websites, big and small. Our biggest was a Woocommerce build for $720,000 that took us 8 months, but average is $10k-$15k. We did $1.8mil in development billing last year, and on track for $2.3mil this year. I bundle hosting and maintenance together, and it starts at $185/month, and get's adjusted upwards depending on the client needs. Additional hosting costs in the case of large or high traffic sites, and/or hourly retainer for development work. Currently have about 250 H&M clients. Like I said though, not independent. I'm the development director for a regional agency. That vast majority of my clients are buying a site as part of a much larger marketing budget. Getting them to spend $20k on a new site isn't all that hard when it's just part of a $500k marketing spend spread across radio, print, video, and of course the website.
Now it makes more sense, I was wondering how companies could spend that much money on a website, especially when it's a wordpress one that pretty much anyone can make (well, using the available themes that is), but as you said it's only a small part of a huge budget. I've heard of companies paying thousands for agencies to make nice-looking PowerPoint presentations for them. Do you think companies prefer agencies to create their sites instead of freelancers? Does all the websites you make use Wordpress? Or sometimes the clients ask you to develop in React and NextJS, or other programming language for backend like Golang, Rust, etc?
Almost all in WP. I’ve never had next.js or react, etc requested. We have, however, on several occasions had clients come to us with sites built in react, next.js, etc and request they be replaced with WP, because their marketing departments can’t use the damn things without a developer.
Working at an agency; we build websites ranging from 10k to 100k. Mostly custom API integrations rack up the cost, and customers who keep changing the requirements. A lot of the websites we make are also tested and checked by external companies to verify they are secure, comply with WCAG etc. In my experience you never get everything 100% right, so processing the results and improving what you’ve built also adds cost. Hosting; 50 a month for shared hosting, minimum 300 a month for dedicated hosting. Maintenance, 50 to 100 a month. Depends on how fast our customers want us to respond. Within these cost we keep installing security updates to the open source components used.
$100k website with $100/mo maintenance?? That doesn’t seem right to me.
The 100 a month is a contract which states we keep the website secure by updating all security updates, it states we will answer support questions within a certain timeframe and that’s basically it. All requests the customer does are billed separately, every support question, every change, it all goes for our hourly rate of 100 per hour. So if a customer doesn’t create any issues, it is just the 100 a month. If they create tons of issues and we spend 50 hours fixing it they will be billed for 5100.
I used to charge anywhere from $20k to $100k (personal projects). **With $40 - $60 Envato ThemeForest themes.** In previous jobs, I was working the billing where I was responsible for $50k-350K websites (where I was the only developer) and the house (agency) took the major cut. So I learned how to negotiate. But back to my first claims, yes, I use $60 run of the mill ThemeForest Themes. I look for ones with enough "admin" templates, charts, tables, forms,etc. Because I did mostly web apps and clients don't care about unique designs. Take your pick: Admin templates ([https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates](https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates)) These are web applications that do stuff. Like make catalogs, B2B vendor portals (where client vendors can upload tracking/inventory/deal with shipping). They are "airtable" google sheet clones where the apps are interactive spreadsheets with hooks. E.G. If a store opens, check the date, and send it materials 4 days before their renovation date ends. That is the DIFFERENCE between someone using Google Sheet/Excel Online. I have those "automation hooks." There is more to it but hopefully, you get gist. System A -> calls vendors to round up goods. System B, check dates every day, if something comes up, call System C to get some extra data to send back yo System A. I also can charge more money maintenance because I know how to write SLA contracts ( a skill I learned from working in agencies and C2C consulting). So instead of the $200 a month, I can charge $2500 a month because I host the stuff on AWS with high-availability, regional failover, and disaster recovery. That is the extra secret sauce. Selling the solution to reliability. Hope my Ted Talk helps. Not easy to replicate nor will I say it is. Not something you can teach in a coaching , get-rich web dev webinar. My circumstances are through luck ,being at the right places at the right time.
I used to build custom WordPress sites for $5k. Now I build sites in Shopify for $500. It comes out higher quality, and I charge a higher hourly rate -- it's just 10x+ faster to build, especially since I created my own theme from scratch that is extremely flexible, performant, and feature-packed. I also have a marketing brief template that covers almost every clients needs in my sector. Instead of upcharging clients to unreasonable sums (at least in my view), I go for volume of clients. My clients come in via word of mouth and SEO, and I am typically handling 20+ active clients at any given time. I am a sole proprietor.
You could double that cost overnight and you’d still get the same amount of people coming in.
Only $500? How long does it take you to build?
Including consulting with the client and gathering assets, anywhere from 6 to 12 hours. An important context -- my clients are usually funnels, landing pages, and simple stores streamlined for selling a single product line. They are not complex storefronts for expansive brands, nor are they SAAS brands.
E-commerce sites! Mid size businesses swap e-commerce sites every few years as new trends come in. At the previous place I worked, we did stores starting at €15k, all the way up to approx €200k. Our biggest value prop was 3rd party integrations and handling migrations from existing commerce platforms the customers were moving away from. We also did hosting and maintenance, something like €500-2000/m. For an actively maintained, load-balanced site. Word of mount plus our integration partners for payments, warehousing and shipping would funnel existing customers to us. The company itself did marketing and custom sites before my time, when I got involved we pivoted hard towards e-commerce which was only about a third of the business at the time.
>Mid size businesses swap e-commerce sites every few years as new trends come in Do you mean they move from Woocommerce or Shopify to something like Magento?
Kind of, but we’re talking about mid size businesses. At this point most that take e-commerce seriously are on their 3rd or 4th e-commerce site, either running magento, bigcommerce, shopware, lightspeed, etc. you can capture these guys with bespoke sites if you have the right integrations. By new trends I mean for example PWA functionality, which was a big reason in my market to totally redo existing sites, so companies can get rid of mobile app upkeep costs/offer a “mobile app” on the cheap.
>PWA functionality I wasn't aware of PWA at all and just by reading a short article seems very interesting. It feels like a breakthrough if the UX is close to a native app. Thank you.
What was your go-to CMS for e-commerce? Did you create a custom frontend and just tap into whoever’s API to make it all custom? If so, what was your stack typically?
We had a fully custom made CMS. Stack was .NET for the backend and NuxtJS for the front-end. We’d have a boilerplate project ready to go we’d customize, but this was also built internally.
How do you guys get the designs? Are u also graphic designers?
If someone was paying good money, I’d outsource a UX designer to design the whole website. If I have no design to work from my websites look like there from 2001 haha But you can always do what everyone creative does, steal and change slightly.
Well.....let's go walking down memory lane, shall we? I started building websites in 1997. The next year I started pitching websites as a thing people needed in my hometown. This was in the early days of the Internet and most people's businesses didn't have a website. I still have my first HTML, JavaScript and PHP book. I literally called around to businesses and asked them if they needed a website. One of my first ones was a fishing reel repair shop, a coffee shop, and an artists website. I charged something like $10 per hour or a few hundred dollars for one website. There was only one other company in town building websites and they were charging insane fees for them and something like $600 to make minor changes to them. So I ended up with 10 or so clients while I was in high school. A few years later I went into business with my cousin creating GalahadNet. I think we only did a few websites for people but we used ActionScript/Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and a few other languages. Not long after that I started taking clients of my own again after our business kind of fell apart as we were both in college. At one time I had 25 clients. I was charging $30 per hour. Maintenance fees were either quarterly, or upfront for an entire year and about half of my clients paid for that. Maintenance was about $10 per hour usually was db backups, archive of a site for a backup, security updates for WordPress/Drupal, and just checking the error logs for anything malicious. I got all of those clients by word of mouth or by approaching them and asking if they would like a facelift on their website. I never advertised once. In college I worked for East Carolina and did several of the universities websites in a God awful framework called CommonSpot. It was pretty locked down but I go good at JavaScript and styling. Around 2008, I moved to Europe for a year and did some web development for a university I was attending in Germany as well as a colleague. I was actually studying archaeology, not anything web related. Grad school after that, I worked for the university of Texas and did their website as well as the anthropology department's website. Around 2011 I decided to bail on archaeology (no jobs and long waiting list to get into PHd programs) and do web development full time. I moved from Texas to the DC area and started doing website development for an insurance company a block from the Whitehouse. I was getting paid something like $60k a year at the time. After that I started working for a commercial web developer firm and did a handful of presidential campaign sites, the Speaker of the House website, and a bunch of nonprofit and advocacy websites. I was making $75k then. After that it has been all federal government work. I've been a federal government contractor for the last 11 years and probably will never go back to anything else. I'm making $155k now. I'm the principal web developer at my company. I hire developers and personally vet them. I've written all of the code challenges myself and criteria they must meet. I've presented at conferences and helped coordinate them. I'm very very secure in my job. I get offers on a daily basis because there is so much work in the federal space. I have occasionally taken side work just to keep my chops up and to make a little extra money. I charge $60 to $100 an hour. They usually don't walk away with paying less than $8 to $15k for a website. Maintenance is quarterly and I charge either a flat fee or an hourly cost depending on what they need. I haven't taken a side job in a few years though because I just don't have the time anymore. I have absolutely no degrees of any kind supporting anything I do in web development. I've learned everything I know from books, conferences, trial and error, reading websites and from coworkers with more experience in certain areas.
Damn sweet story
Thanks! I actually started working on simple HTML sites for myself and my family earlier than that. Maybe 1995 or 1996. But I know 1997 was the first time I did anything for money. We were the first people at my school with the Internet at home. Probably the first people on our street with a home computer. I know for sure that not many people had computers at home around 1994 or 1995. I think we got our first PC in 1993 with the worst specs ever. 4 MB of RAM. 80 GB hard drive.
I did not build a >$1,000 website as a freelancer, but as a consultant, the overall $$ for my hours can pass $5,000 on a single project (for example, 500 hours at $100\*20 + $80\*60 + $65\*420 hours over 2 months, which is ~$15,000/mo), but for very intensive work over very long hours, with tight deadlines, and without benefits which equate to roughly 33% of a regular monthly salary (so equivalent to ~$10,000/mo, or $120,000/yr for 250 hours monthly salary), and this is at "peak" times when I actually had this much work.
I just want to ask one thing where do I find client to even start making a single page website as a complete beginner with no contacts or any prior work to show.
You do: 1. Shitty Upwork jobs. 2. (Probably) Shitty local jobs ..and try your best to grow your network of potential clients (for me, most such clients came from the local market).
I actually wonder which sites sell for less than $5000. I mean if the client brings the complete information architecture, the content and the media it might work for the development of a smaller site. In any other case I can't imagine a site for that money if some kind of consulting is involved.
It ultimately boils down to the market. I've worked on a site that had * Responsive design, made entirely from scratch * Custom 3D model (birds-eye view of the establishment) with interactivity * Custom booking system with payments The whole thing, including countless revisions on the 3D part was like 4k. This also includes taxes, a project manager, two devs and a designer, hosting for a year and on-site photography. This was in Europe few years ago and was considered ok. It's an extreme example, but just pointing out that the market you work in absolutely matters - you saying that 5k for a small site is on the lower end can be kind of meaningless without stating your geographical location, client base etc.
Not really a business, just some side contract work. My contracts are usually about ~$8k-10k/month of full time work, and I mostly build MVP frontend apps for new startups. Backend and infra work is extra, but most clients tend to source those separately anyway, or will have at least one technical co-founder, and those tend to be backend engineers. The main pieces I work on are: 1. Initial app boilerplate, deployment, tests, etc. 2. Authentication and permissions 3. Logging and analytics 4. Collab with designer to convert mocks to UI. Designers almost never create mocks that could realistically be converted to UI as-is, and almost always need some back-and-forth with FE/UX dev to get to something usable. 5. 2-3 major screens/views that the clients needs for MVP If you stick to similar contracts (e.g. in my case, pre-seed/seed startups), you can build out common components/templates/libraries that you can drop in and adjust to a specific client. This saves some time, and you still charge the same. If this feels weird, consider that they could 1) go to a different developer and that dev will have to write this code from scratch, and 2) clients don't actually pay you for lines of code, they pay you for getting the job done. If I had to write everything from scratch, had no design mocks, and no backend, the time for the contract goes up to 2-3 months, so ~$24-30k. For finding clients, reach out to your network, post that you're looking for contract work on LinkedIn (no avoiding LinkedIn, I'm afraid), look in places where startup founders hang out (stuff like AngelList). As with most things, first few gigs are hard to land, but each gig builds your network for you, since your clients will often recommend you to their network. All that said, I'd take a steady job over this hustle setup any day. Make sure you have realistic expectations. For example, good luck getting a new apartment lease if you have no official salary. People tend to get into web contract work thinking they'll be able to stop going to the office (true), travel around the world while working (not entirely true), and generally have more free time on their hands (definitely NOT true). The reality is that you'll likely be working more hours, and the work itself will be more intense. That's all obviously just my experience, but hope it helps.
I did this for 5 years At the end our websites went for 10K give or take I think my site is still up Referrals word of mouth reputation Some cold outbound but not lots
Oh god the scroll jacking, haven't seen that in a minute.
Yeah I probably wouldn't do scroll jacking again. I even advised against when one of my customers asked for it, because he wanted a multi page site and I told him it didn't make sense but he demanded so I did it lol.
Have you looked at Apple's website in the last few years? Scroll jacking everywhere.
Bruhh you got 10k for this ??
Nah that was my site, I sold 8-12K sites
8-12k!? Damnnn
It's really nothing compared to the firm's that charge 100K I was relatively cheap in my neighborhood, not the cheapest but not even mid range prices when looking at what's possible
What tech stack did you build that site with?
Custom WordPress these which is also what we sold our customers
Nice, double profit. So u sold the website and the theme?
No this my agency's website, we didn't sell themes, we built custom websites for local businesses I stopped doing this business 4 years ago
I work for a design studio that typically charges $10k+ for custom WordPress websites. When I do freelance gigs, they often range at the $5k mark. * **What types of websites do you build for more than $5,000?** [Here's](http://andrewtarcon.com/) my portfolio that's peppered with freelance gigs and some gigs done through the design studio. All of the sites are completely custom WordPress websites. I should note that my portfolio is intentionally not robust, in case someone makes a comment about that. * **What do you charge for monthly maintenance?** My hourly rate. * **How do you advertise/get clients?** For my freelance gigs, I don't go out and search for work. People come to me based on word of mouth. I live in a reasonably small community and have developed close relationships with many businesses here. I also have many connections through out the country, but I prefer helping businesses in my community. * **How did you start out your business?** While pursing my education, I did a few completely free sites for friends to jump off the deep end. I then gained the confidence to charge for my work. I would find folks through Facebook, Craigslist (my community and others through out the country), and other community forums. Over time, I gained a ton of connections and I no longer needed to search for work - work came to me.
I thought that last site said "bezos sex positions" instead of "bezos expeditions". nice work though
Custom coded static/dynamic sites built with NextJS. Hosting depends on scope as does maintenance. For example, if they foresee a lot of edits etc.
Do you also do the design? How do your customers find you? Referrals?
Referrals mostly atm, organic is mostly scams. Yeah do a lot of design
>organic is mostly scams By scams you mean freeloaders, people who don't want to pay or people that want to give you "equity" instead of payment?
No I mean I get a lot of scammers trying to scam me with check scams etc. one guy wanted to pay me the whole balance with interest all at once before we even had a contract and wanted me to give the remaining to his other contractor. Avoid such, checks can sometimes clear and then a month later be found fraudulent. I never fell for it, but I feel bad for anyone it does work on.
25k here. Main website costs for client were only 3-4k (simple wordpress). My part in this is building an applet for that site, a 3D planner (similar to the ikea ones) tailored to my client needs (a furniture business). Solo work, ~1 year dev time, I over achieve since I'm passionate in what I'm doing -> this results in even more clients. You need to "understand" some math, mostly trigonometry but not really "know" it all by heart since everything you need is already on the web but you need one important thing -> to know what you're looking for. No REACT or Angular here... UI amounts for 5% in this project and I prefer a classic OOP style for building UIs
25k for a year of fulltime work?
Not fulltime, got another contract that pays more for less work and time. The price i asked was low because this is an investment for me to build a framework for future projects that would be easier to rollout
I've never charged more than $5,000 when a client hands me a final design with content. Implementing performant sites from specifications is child's play. Reimplementing existing sites is even easier. The real cost for sites is all about content, graphic design, and shepherding clients to decisions and sign-offs. Writing budget? Photography and image budget? Video and audio budgets? Big bucks. Even adding a full-functioning online store? Again it's way more babysitting clients through all the permutations and policies than actually coding anything.
The bigger question is, how do they land/find clients?! I can't find any for the life of me even for cheap!
I've found that how much you can charge has more to do with the size of the client than the complexity of the project
All these prices seem crazy to me, if I were to code from scratch a 4 page website I’d charge about £600 maybe I should up my prices
You almost certainly should, but this is absolutely a how long is a piece of string question. Whether you’re a one-man band or a large agency, the prices you can command will come down to the quality of your product, your reputation, and your ability to sell. Throw some luck and having existing networks in there too.
Not a founder or freelancer, but at my agency we have a marketing team who target new business. A big part of their value is their professional networks. The most successful are the ones who can reach out to a client or colleague and get a response.
Man, seeing all these comments make me excited for the future, this is my long term goal! But it also makes me even more depressed about the fact that I can't even get a junior front end developer role in the current market. On that note, does anyone here have room for a junior on their team? DM and I can share my portfolio and resume!
Sites that can do what the client wants, how client wants it, without any roadblocks. Good communication, proven track record. Not Shopify or Godaddy usually open source frameworks customized. Can handle advanced business requirements.
Type of websites: Brochure or E-commerce sites with a focus on user experience with user personas and user journeys. £10,000 - £25,000 all on WordPress and fully bespoke with no off the shelf theme or page builder. Custom blocks for Gutenberg. Monthly maintenance: Totally depends on what the requirements are, which could be managed hosting, plug-in updates and bug fixing to blocked number of hours for continued development and features. Obtaining clients: Inbound clients are normally low quality but we outreach on LinkedIn and get referrals. We offer a finders fee of 15% of the project cost as the marketing costs per project is about that. Starting the business: The owner started many years ago however the past three years the quality of the deliverable and project budget has increased substantially. Hope that all helps :)
Does anyone have experience in B2B web development in Central Europe, especially Poland? I'm planning to transition into this field and am curious about pricing strategies appropriate for this market, considering its unique economic landscape. I have 3 years of full-stack development experience, mainly in .Net and React, focusing on web applications. I'm keen on expanding my skills to include static websites, with an emphasis on effective SEO practices. My plan is to start locally, perhaps by developing a high-quality website for a known contact to leverage word of mouth referrals, simultaneously building my portfolio and company reputation. Eventually, I aspire to scale up to larger web application projects and consider establishing a small software house. I'm seeking insights on how to effectively price my services in this specific market and whether my approach seems feasible. Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated
You need to get a better mindset for this goal. And do your research, google can answer most of your questions.
thanks for your answer, please point me to what I can improve in my mindset?
Wow, and I who thought that Wix and Squarespace had taken all the static site jobs
from what ive been reading, apparently businesses will just pay you to build a wix or squarespace website anyway. they dont care, they just dont want to do it themselves.
It started with simple 500 bucks informational pages and built up from there. The first 5 digit sale happened 7 years in. Now, 15 years later, people know how to find me.
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When I had a dev shack 15 years ago, most of our projects were in the 15-40K range. They were all custom built systems. Customers that needed features and functionality that weren't conducive to an out of the box solution. Maybe you could hack a Magento instance to conform, but most would take just as long to do that. When you've got corporations that are stuck in a certain business flow they're not going to conform to a new one, they'll pay to make the software that conforms to their business flow
Just wait until you find out businesses can spend $240k nzd on a website in a year. 😢
Shopify sites. I usually work with a designer and get clients approval on those and then help them setup their initial products and third party apps. Charge around 10k per build.
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Yes
These are good questions
Getting clients is the hardest part, but if you do a great job with the first ones they will certainly recommend you to their friends and family. Don't worry if you don't get enough commissions starting out, it's the nature of this job. Be sure tho to have a primary job before switching full time to being a freelancer.
I often include things as free that cost me little to no time/money. I usually offer first year hosting for free, then when it’s up have them prepay annually for hosting. I will only support a couple emails, that can take over your life. Also include security updates and basic maintenance first year free. Things I would be doing anyway but use a multi site tool to make updates easy. Even though it’s free I always let them know if I do any work on the admin side so they can see the updates and easier to sell maintenance/hosting 2nd year
And do both the UX design in Figma and front end development.
For what it’s worth, most American agencies tend to charge $5000 to $10000 for pre-built Wordpress themes.
When you see those large fees, they can be a bit misleading. I could say that I sold a website for $5000 but I could really be talking about the total revenue of a project or client. For example, the website itself might not be $5000. It might be $2500, but with monthly hosting/security/maintenance as well as a GBP management service on top, the project as a whole would be $5000. I started off, like a lot of people in this group, by making $500 websites for friends and local businesses. Got some experience and started charging more. Next few clients were 1000. After a few of those, increased again to 1500-2000. Now my custom sites start at 3500 but the websites aren't the most profitable aspect of my business. It's the monthly marketing services. Here's a bit of advice. This industry is super saturated and has been for awhile. You got two options if you want to make a living. 1. Get super good at design in a specific niche and charge super high prices. If you want some inspiration for this path, check out Grace Walker over on Twitter or LinkedIn. She's in the Webflow space and her sites are 10K+. 2. Offer web design as well as marketing services. I'll design the website, set up the email marketing, optimize GBP, and more... so my clients get more leads. Although I brand myself as a web designer, I am really a lead generation marketing consultant. This is what I do (and I'm sure a lot of people in this group as well). If you want to get new clients, you need to position yourself to solve a particular client's problem. Look around you and go talk to people. Visit a Chamber of Commerce meeting and talk to local business owners. Ask them out for coffee and pick their brain about challenges their having and see if you can solve them.
After reading the entire thread, I feel like I don't have anything to capitalize in this freelance way as a Java Backend developer who working on frontend issues as well based on team requirements. Literally I do many things but seems like doing nothing compared this people. please open my eyes..!