Rates

I consider honesty and openness to be a key asset for successful business relations. Unfortunately I often observe the opposite: secrecy and hidden agendas. I do not enjoy managing secrets and private plots. The downside is that this weakens my position during negotiations.

That is why I have decided to put my rates, discounts, and general business principals onto the website. This way everybody can check them upfront and can decide whether they can accept these terms or not. To safe everybody some time, I declare these terms non-negotiable.

Prices and discounts

	per hour	per day (8h)
short-term *	90 €	720 €
long-term **	75 €	600 €

All prices excluding VAT.

* short-term: Generally 5 work days or less. We agree on no minimum amount of time upfront. Everything is handled, when it’s finished.

** long-term: Generally more than 5 work days. We talk about my expected weekly time allocation for the project and it’s general time line upfront. We start working and I will write monthly invoices according to the actual hours spent on the project.

Open Source work

I will add another 5% discount to the rates described above if my work or large parts of it will be released under an open source license. The license shall be accepted by the Free Software Foundation. Furthermore the work has to be associated with my name - either by giving me the permission to release it or, if you release it, by adding it to the credits, changelogs or commit messages.

Fixed-bid projects

To be honest, I do not like fixed-bid projects.

• They pose a large risk on my side. They need a lot of upfront organization.
• They make it difficult to handle change.
• They make us sit on different sides of the table - instead of working hand in hand.

However, people still ask for it, so I will offer them as well. To make the process of price calculations transparent for you I will tell you upfront how I will determine the price tag:

1. I will split up all known requirements into work packages.
2. I will try to estimate the effort for each package separately. I will try to be pessimistic.
3. I will sum up the individual estimations.
4. I will add a factor of 1.5 to make sure, that bad estimates and underspecified packages will not ruin my calculation.
5. Additionally, I will track all the hours that I needed to come up with these numbers and add them as well.
6. I will determine the final sum using my long-term rates described above.

If this is okay for you, we can agree on a fixed-bid project.