Necronic
Staff member
I've been working on Access for a while now, and I am almost at a point where I feel capable of putting out a quality product that people would pay money for. I'm currently doing some pro-bono work for a friend's business to set up a reference and a portfolio. Sadly my best work is done at my day job and I can under no circumstances use that in a portfolio.
Anyways, I've been thinking about doing this for a while now, but I am realizing that I have no idea how much to charge for something like this. Since I am a one man operation with a day job, I wouldn't be able to put more than 10-20 hours a week into a project, and my ability to support a completed database would be limited by my day job, so I don't think I should be charging 'normal' rates, whatever that may be.
The one thing I do bring to the table that most database developers don't is a strong understanding of statistics, process control, and engineering economics, so not only can I write a database for you to your design, I can give you a better understanding of what your design should be. People could tell me really vague stuff like 'hey, I want more aggregate information about my sales figures' and I can interpret that into a number of different options.
I was thinking of charging something really small for my first couple of projects, like 1-300$ depending on the complexity. Anyways, if you were a small business owner and you wanted a database to track inventory or sales or employee performance, how much would you be willing to pay a pretty much fly by night developer?
Also, for those of you who know me and my inability to follow through, please ignore that for the sake of this discussion. It's not like the customers would know that.
Anyways, I've been thinking about doing this for a while now, but I am realizing that I have no idea how much to charge for something like this. Since I am a one man operation with a day job, I wouldn't be able to put more than 10-20 hours a week into a project, and my ability to support a completed database would be limited by my day job, so I don't think I should be charging 'normal' rates, whatever that may be.
The one thing I do bring to the table that most database developers don't is a strong understanding of statistics, process control, and engineering economics, so not only can I write a database for you to your design, I can give you a better understanding of what your design should be. People could tell me really vague stuff like 'hey, I want more aggregate information about my sales figures' and I can interpret that into a number of different options.
I was thinking of charging something really small for my first couple of projects, like 1-300$ depending on the complexity. Anyways, if you were a small business owner and you wanted a database to track inventory or sales or employee performance, how much would you be willing to pay a pretty much fly by night developer?
Also, for those of you who know me and my inability to follow through, please ignore that for the sake of this discussion. It's not like the customers would know that.
(yes I have experience Chaz hehe love ya bro) maintenance is a tricky thing. Is your day job self business? or you work for someone? Generally, most DB tend to be "stable" for the most part, but when it becomes unstable, broken, or whatever, you kinda need to get on top of things and fix it asap especially if you provide maintenance for it. If you just built it and hand over to the business IT team, then you might still be called upon when they can't figure out how to fix it. (you might want to consider that too)
