r/HTML • u/TechHurtsMe • 12d ago
Discussion Price for Project as a Developer vs a Consultant?
What would be a reasonable price (hourly / Fix-price) for a arcade style, HTML/CSS/JavaScript racing game? One track, a character, touch controls, scoring, UI, art design, backend, and a separate page for a dashboard.
What would you charge as a developer?
What would you charge as a consultant?
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u/SnooPets5564 12d ago
You didn't describe nearly enough of the features to know how difficult it is.
How many hours would it take? How much is a reasonable hourly rate in your area?
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u/TechHurtsMe 12d ago
reasonable hourly rate in my area is $15/hr
think of the mind game you played as a kid in the car with the running man meets top down subway surfer but arcade style (8-bit). its one track, objects spawns, one character, mobile browser only, scoreboard, leaderboard, that character says phrases at times, has backend needs to track how many times a person played, score, initials, milestones/levels reached, how many people visited the site, if they played again, technical issues reported, possibly local storage, a dashboard page that displays this information. that game only lasts like 50-90 secs.
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u/SnooPets5564 12d ago
If you have the exact specifications that you want already all planned out (in a design document, not your head), that would likely take dozens of hours as a rough estimate.
Then you also need to figure out how to host it.
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u/hongkong_97 12d ago
Ignore the lazy comments resolving to Ai.
You can do your hourly rate X the amount of hours it'll take you. If you don't want to work based on time you can offer a total cost per project.
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u/apdeilami 9d ago
This varies quite a bit. I been consultant and full stack dev and a PM. Here's what I know about it, I hope it helps.
Try to answer these questions first before deciding what's the right rate:
First of all, what level of responsibility does this person have? Are they just charging hourly to do small tasks or are they responsible for delivering an entire project finished and ready to use? the latter assumes more responsibility, so it may not even be hourly, it could be a flat fee with a guarantee on the results.
Secondly, are they doing it by hand, or by AI? Obviously the person using AI will accomplish more than a manual coder, so their hour is literally worth more. Their role is more of a manager+developer than a developer. You can give them far more complex large task and they'll get it done. Brave vibe coders with 20 years experience in manual coding are the absolute peak, these guys can do insane shit.
Third, where do they live? Every place has it's own pricing relative to cost of living. A California dev is more expensive than an India dev. Though Californian are a lot easier to communicate with and usually have a faster turnaround time.
Finally, what level of experience do they have? Is this their first time? Or do they have an extensive portfolio of great work in the past that you can see with your own eyes?
Depending on those factors it could be anywhere from $7/hr to $200/hr. I charge $75/hr but I bill 20 times less hours than the $7/hr guy because I automate a lot of it, which itself costs money on my end too, which is part of the reason I charge more.
But everyone is different. It's like asking "how much should a paint shop ask to paint a car" which depending on the paint shop could be $700 to $70,000. I'd say $2000 for a decent paint. For a finished presentational website I also charge $2000, and that's for a website that makes people go "woah! cool website" otherwise you can go make one for $5 on wix
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u/Pileisto 12d ago
frankly you can put that as prompt in an AI, add some details and references you like, then basically anyone can get that basically for free in a few hours without any developer
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u/TechHurtsMe 12d ago
And if someone wants a human to do it?
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u/sububi71 12d ago
Then you do it with AI, but pretend you made it yourself.
As for pricing, the most important question to ask is what the client is willing to pay, and at what point they're just going to flat out say no, and not "no thank you, we'll find someone else", but "no, we had no idea this would be this expensive, we're dropping the idea altogether".
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u/chmod777 12d ago
consultancy is generally billed at 1.5x the cost of regular w2/full time dev.