How Much Do I Charge To Maintain A Website?
February 7, 2010 under FAQ
I was contacted by a non-profit organization to help maintain their website and tutor the director in Joomla until she gets the hang of it. We are to meet next week for lunch to discuss. Money has not come up yet. If this turns into a paying job in which I maintain the website for the director, what should I charge?
I also may make contributions such as graphics. Should I charge by the hour for graphical work and how much?
Search more about How Much Do I Charge To Maintain A Website?:
given how bad the economy is, and how people afford stuff as is.
maybe 5 bucks a month or something.
try to post advertisements, network with people, or something, so that you can get as many people buying into your business as possible.
Leaving aside considerations of Good Will, Reputation, and Contributing to the Community and My Resume, when I was doing programming work I found it very useful to specify clearly what I would do and what it would cost, so I could later say “these are my hours, this is what I did and no I won’t do that for this fee” normally, I would start limited and say so, so costs did not balloon to the shock of those paying.
Tutoring is very time consuming and is time limited - you can only do so much before the student gets tired and starts losing focus - but you still have to travel to and from the teaching site.
“Maintain” also may mean something different to you and them. When I volunteered to maintain a non-profit web site, I first had to rescue it from the previous guy who did a bunch of work and then kidnapped the site by hosting it on his servers and began threatening to take it all down unless paid. Then, because of “features” he had put in, I had to simplify the site to get it up. Having settled from a “creation” mode to a “maintain” mode, it was like pulling teeth to get information about upcoming meetings for the site - instead of changing for the next meeting right after the previous, the old data was up for 2-3 weeks - one person wanted to manage everything and not release anything until every detail was in.
So is it “maintain” at $35/hour or “design and upgrade” at ? or …
$500
Whatever you charge, it’s a write off for them. Unless they are friends of yours, your time is money and your skill should be compensated. $75 an hour is a fair and reasonable rate. If you’re not being compensated, you can write it off on your own taxes as a charitable donation.
If you really feel moved by the work of the organization then you can work for free unless this thing sucks out lot of time and you have some other ways to earn decent.
Else make them clear that your hard work will cost them some money and you can charge them as per hour or better as per assignment given to you.
It really all depends on how much you’re worth. How much experience do you have? Do you have a portfolio that represents that experience? Do you have references that your client can call to make sure you’ve done a good job in the past? That all goes into what you’ll charge. But to answer the big picture question, typically you charge by the hour.
I charge by the hour ($50/hr for most of my clients). If you need to give a flat rate, figure out how many hours you think it will take to maintain it, and multiply by what you would charge per hour.