Ask HN: Is $300/HR too low these days for custom full stack?
Background. I'm a solo dev. I used to just bid contract jobs at around 25% less than where I used to work. So back in 2008 I would bid $75k to go solo on a job I knew my former employer would charge $100k for. I switched to an hourly rate around 2012 because I was tired of re-negotiating over every new feature (or what constituted a feature). At that point I just did an estimate, backwards from my job rate, and settled on $75/hr. Since then I've increased to $300/hr. But even back then, in 2012, I knew freelance consultants who specialized in something like Salesforce setups, who would come into someone's office and charge $450/hr to be there. Is $300/hr stupidly cheap now? I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand. I'd like to hear from anyone in a similar position.
Discussion Highlights (6 comments)
mujib77
Honestly if people are still willing to pay $300/hr consistently, you’re probably doing something right Most clients care more about results/reliability than whether every line was typed by hand.
bruce511
>> I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand. Spoken like someone who charges by the hour.... you are incentivised to do things the slowest possible way... Now, of course, slow might be better, or fast might be better, but you frame fast as "cheating" not as "inferior"... which is ... interesting..
Lionga
Over 20 years of experience in full stack and mobile here. I'll do it for $200/hr and even use LLMs where useful so half the time is needed. Unless you are a very well known expert in a certain niche, who the hell is paying $400/hr?
owebmaster
Do you have demand for 8h/day, 5days/week?
launchseed
Buyer side perspective: i'm 18, shipped a product this year. the rate was never what i was looking at. it was whether the person could tell me what something would cost before they built it. a dev who scopes accurately at $300/hr beats one at $150/hr who doesn't every time. the llm thing is a separate question. the code either holds up or it doesn't, how it got there is a methods question not a morality one.
maryamshafaqat
$300/hr does not sound cheap for coding it sounds cheap if clients are paying for deep experience reliability and business understanding on top of the code.