hackeronymous

Actually, no. But I can see why you would think that. I literally don't know the range of what is reasonable and what is not. Your comment is implicitly informative, though. Furthermore, if I was being boastful, I would probably not be hiding behind an anonymous account.

Am I missing something? Is what I said offensive in some way to someone? If so, would you please care to clarify?

why the downvote? It was an honest question.

Brilliant advice.

I should probably mention that even though I spent 20h/day working on it, I spent/spend virtually every waking hour either reading/writing/thinking about writing software/business. I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't party. I live with my fiancee, and work pretty much every waking hour on something or other. I don't have a blog because it would consume too much time, and I don't interact with other developers because I worry that it will pull me toward the middle of the bell curve. I worry that I may be going insane, but only passively.

how much per hour would you say that it's worth?

Precisely. As well as the increased risk of having no contracts for long-stretches of time, and the additional overhead time of promotion, customer relations, etc.

It seems to me that you got seriously shafted on that deal. I don't think that the app I made was much more complex, i.e. I probably maybe spent 10x as much time as you did on that one, but I made 200x more money doing it. The pricing of these things seems to be very subjective to me, and contingent on numerous factors including: How much they've actually got to pay for it? How much they think they can get away with? How much they think someone else would bill them for it? How much their friends tell them it should cost? What is the actual application? How much incremental money do they stand to make as a result of its existence? And very little with how much time/effort actually goes into it on your part. Ofhand, you could have easily made at least $5k on that site. And if it was for a more general purpose, i.e. as opposed to just one dealership, you could have made much more.

Oh, I see what you mean. It probably took about 1000 hours total, but spanned over a period of a year. So maybe 20 hours per week. I was just learning Rails at the time, so it took a bit longer than it otherwise would have. I could probably make what I made in about 1 to 2 months tops now.

The problem with billing by the hour is that developer performance varies by a factor of 10x or more, whereas hourly fees vary by about 5x. And most clients would not feel comfortable playing $250-$300/hour unless there was some way for them to justify it. (i.e. more people involved, despite the fact that they may do nothing). Besides, why charge per hour? If I solve your problem, what does it matter how long it took me to do it?