How to determine what to charge for building custom Android applications?

Question

How do I determine how much to charge for building Android applications? In other words, how do I tell the client how much money I want?

The client is asking me to tell how much time it will take and the cost for the application. I can tell them the time, but I don't know how to approach determining the cost.

How do freelancers demand their price? Is it per page or per activity and how much? (For example, how much in dollars or INR per page or per hour or per month)

Answer 1

I tend to work out all of my prices on a estimation of the time of the project as it is currently defined, +20% contingency. I will then look at how this fits with their budget, if I forsee they will be repeat clients and require maintenance I will often take this price lower.

I would recommend you do it in this way. Pricing "by page" generally devalues you work and doesn't normally reflect the fact you are producing quality work that you are proud of.

Make sure that the requirements of the project are clearly laid out - if the client wants to add feature X this is known as slippage and should be chargeable extra. If you do not do this you may find you end up doing an awful lot of work for not a great deal!

This is a good article on pricing websites but is applicable to most situations: http://css-tricks.com/how-much-should-you-charge-for-a-website/

Answer 2

To offer a different perspective, I charge strictly hourly on all of my contracts. I like the flexibility this offers me when a client wants to add or change something to the project. It also lets me decide how much my time is worth - for example if I have a lot of free time and nothing to do, I can offer discount rates (supply & demand, lots of time + no demand = cheap rates).

The down side to hourly rates is that it adds extra work to your bid. You have to be able to accurately estimate how long a particular project may take, which you may not be able to do if you're just starting out or if the project is complex.

As Tim.Baker said, make sure the requirements are clearly laid out. This is typically done through what is called a "statement of work", which amounts to a contract that explains in detail what the customer expects of you and what you expect of your customer. This should have a clause that describes how you will charge for any additional work the customer adds to the project later on - whether you will charge hourly for the extra work or renegotiate the SOW and project price.

Answer 3

I found these three articles which are part of a series to be extremely helpful in determining how to bill for my work.

Fixed:

http://www.sitepoint.com/charge-websites-fixed-price-projects/

Hourly:

http://www .sitepoint.com/charge-websites-pay-per-hour-projects/

Agile:

http://www.sitepoint.com/charge-websites-agile-way/

I found them all to be very well detailed and was even exposed to this new model, Agile billing, which is interesting because it mirrors the Agile development cycle but for freelancer looking to balance their time and value in a billing model.

The reason I posted all three is so you can clearly go to and read the one that might work for you. It was also not immediately clear at first that there were three articles, I read the hourly(#2) article first for example.