Hourly rate for custom Excel development?

[Greg Lovern]

I've started doing some custom Excel development, and my wife says I'm
not charging enough. What's the range of what's being charged for that?
Not just hourly rate when that's how the job is being billed, but also
hourly rate as figured into fixed price contracts.


Obviously experience factors into how much to charge, so here's a brief
summary:

I've been developing Excel solutions since 1992. I passed the old Excel
and Excel VBA MCP exams in 1994. I've been a MCSD since 1997 (VB4, and
again in 2003 with VB6).

I was at Microsoft for over 9 years as a product support engineer. Over
three of those years were in Excel, where I was promoted to the
escalation team, then to Washington State escalation lead (there were
escalation leads two other states, too). I was also promoted to
Query/DAO/ODBC lead. Then, I moved on to VB support while VB5 was
current and was there for VB6.

Before Microsoft, I cut my teeth on Excel development at a restaurant,
starting with automating their bookkeeping spreadsheets. That was all
in XLM in Excel 3.0 & 4.0, before VBA.

I've also written two Excel add-ins (actually they're VB6 DLLs that I
call from Excel add-ins) that I sell as shareware.


I've been charging $40/hour, and offer $25/hour for low-priority work
done on evenings & weekends.

Any thoughts?


Thanks,

Greg Lovern
http://PrecisionCalc.com
More Power In Excel

 

[Charles Williams]

If you are serious then your wife is correct. If you are just doing it for
fun then your rates are fine.

Depends on what kind of work you are doing and who your customers are, but
for example assuming you are developing serious Excel/Database applications
for blue chip customers you should (IMHO) at least double your rate and
forget about your 'low-priority' rate.

Charles
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