Pricing a php project

[j_mckitrick]

Hi all,

I've been asked to do my first php project, other than my personal
homepage. I'm an experienced developer, and after getting a couple of
books and doing some experimenting, I'm generating pdf reports from
data files and getting ready to add mysql support.

Are there any guidelines I can follow for pricing a php/web project?
Hourly doesn't seem right for *this* project, since I was still
learning php. But from here on out, I should be much faster. But how
do I charge for *this* one?

Thanks in advance,
JM

[Michael]

First of all make a scale of the minimum price that you would ever ask
for and then for the highest (be serious now, no £1 million). Now
think of something that you would do for the minimum price (for example
this could be webdesgning, no dynamic content for a small bussiness
only 5 pages) lets say your minimum price is £50. Now lets say that
you maximum price is £5000 for a heavily interactive website that is
all dynamically generated with php, mysql and javascript, and lets say
for that you will need to write a few thousand lines of code, and make
a CMS that can support news, users, pages, links, search, email,
forums, lets also assume that it will take you about 3 weeks of work.
Now from that depending on how complex and how long you ESTIMATE it
will take, how much extra from scratch coding you have to do, whether
you have to make content for it and whether you will be needed to
maintain it in the future (generally charge more if you wont be needed
to maintain it in the future as that will be another oppertunity to
make money pass). From this using your scale you should be able to
deduce a competitive price for what you are doing. Also look around at
other coders and see what they are charging for the same price.

[lawrence k]

j_*********@bigfoot.com wrote:

Hi all,

I've been asked to do my first php project, other than my personal
homepage. I'm an experienced developer, and after getting a couple of
books and doing some experimenting, I'm generating pdf reports from
data files and getting ready to add mysql support.

Are there any guidelines I can follow for pricing a php/web project?
Hourly doesn't seem right for *this* project, since I was still
learning php. But from here on out, I should be much faster. But how
do I charge for *this* one?

I'd ask around and try to figure out what an experienced programmer
would have charged for it. Let's assume a good programmer would have
wanted $30 to $50 an hour (depending on where you live) and could have
done the whole thing in 20 hours - the price should be between $600 and
a $1000. You may have taken 50 hours because you were learning, but you
should not charge for the extra 30 hours. To get an estimate of how
much time an experienced programmer would have put in, you'll need to
offer more details of the project, either here or by sending it to
programmers you know. Make sure the programmers understand script
languages, as writing the thing from scratch in C would have taken
longer, and a C programmer would overestimate the time it might take to
do something in a script language.

[j_mckitrick]

Thank you both for your comments.

I did a line count, and it will end up being about 800 lines of code,
after everything has been nicely refactored into classes and all. This
does not include the sql support. It is only the first deliverable to
that will use csv data files to show the reports. DB support will be
next.

I extended a pdf class, added a couple of others. Then there's a main
routine that reads the data files and generates the reports. This will
be extended to work dynamically with a web site.

Does that provide any more detail?