a guy from an Australian design firm (hi there if you're reading this :-) recently commissioned me to skin, customize and integrate a vanilla forum; I'm not sure why he asked me in particular, but especially seeing as mark was on vacation I accepted. I know some of you are going to say that I shouldn't be paid at all and if anything the guy should donate to mark, but a) it's not like understanding/working with software paradigms (let alone programming itself) is something your average joe can do, and b) universities aren't cheap.
so yeah, as stupid as it sounds I don't really know what I should charge :-/ So far I've: - skinned vanilla from the ground up (according to their design), in addition to editing a few template files - written practically a mini-cms embedded within vanilla, with a wholly integrated search and support for 2 levels of subpages - written a caching version of jazzman's discussion overview, reducing the sql queries per page load from n + 1 (where n = category number) to 1 - added several miscellaneous features (sidepanel login, context search, category-specific coloring, etc.)
all in all I've written ~1060 lines of code and ~850 lines of css (that's w/ whitespace/comments though), and he still wants a sidepanel-based photo manager and integration with LDAP authentication.
this is the first time I'm actually programming for pay so I'm sort of at a loss...
I've thought about the hourly thing, but I haven't any accurate idea of how many hours I've been working on it. could be anywhere between 10 and 25, or even outside of that... I was hoping someone might have enough experience to estimate something from the work rather than the time taken. it was probably naive of me but we didn't agree on anything yet, partly because I hadn't anticipated how involved the work was going to be; indeed, it was after finishing that cms thing that I decided it might be a good idea to pay more attention to the whole issue of payment.
yes, I think I'll clean that extension up and release it after I'm done.
Payment brings up other issues. Off the top of my head:
Documentation. Not just a README file, be careful about documenting every project requirement in advance. Otherwise you could find yourself in an argument with your customer on whether or not your software works "as agreed on".
Support. How much bug fixing will you be responsible for after delivery? What happens if the customer wants additional features?
Copyright. Be very, very clear about this up front. "Work for hire" law has some nasty pitfalls. Who owns the copyrights to your work? If your customer doesn't own it, under what license is he/she using your software? Get this in writing. Seriously.
You are putting your time to their disposal; of course you should get paid, and £30/h sounds reasonably enough.
And do pay attention to squirrels three points. I'd suppose the copyright would remain in the open domain though, with a donation to Lussumo for the "free lease". ;)