Nope, never have and never will. When I start doing it for money, then the fun is gone.

Told you, He's a 'Starving Artist' LOL

We charge $65 per hour. $50 is cheap, considering the value of the dollar worldwide (we are from Europe), and the ongoing prices for professional teams. We do offer flat rates. And just to prove that our prices are not "wrong", we never lacked clients. We have always done work outside the vBulletin community; we then started taking some jobs on vBulletin.org (my colleague name in the forums is CarlitoBrigante), for vBulletin, on July 2007. After a couple of months, we had collected so many loyal clients and many more came to us from word of mouth, that we have not had any need of looking for more job on the website.

Nowadays, even $65 per hour is not enough to pay the bills anymore, so we are moving to a different type of development soon. Let me also add that the hourly rate concept vary strongly from developer to developer. For example, I do not charge my clients for time spent researching the subject of their website (with advanced projects this is always needed, like when you are building a DB of collectible Sports cards or dealing with the Forex market), and I do not charge time spent on errors or on coding parts we had coded and that did not make it into the final code.

To be honest, you CAN find good coders at lower prices, but these are often young coders (that often do not work in an office environment or in a team), people programming for fun (but these will often work for free), or teams from countries of the world were average cost of work per hour is lower, like India.

Finally, many clients we worked with had thought their add-ons were developed by "good" coders, just because they got their product in a few days. When they hired us to check the forums, we found out that their "good" coders had not used even the most basic guidelines behind the development of a secure script. This occurred with one of the most popular chat scripts on the market that can be integrated on vBulletin (and our name is still listed in their news page) which had dozens of injection issues, but it also occurred with custom work. A client had all the credit cards of his users stored in a flat file DB, UNENCRYPTED. He had paid $600 for the script. This happened many months ago, not at the beginning of the PHP era of web development.

As impressive as this may sound, in my experience 3 every 5 scripts in vBulletin communities we have worked for during the past months included security holes that were only mitigated by the fact that some of the scripts were exclusive to the website, so the code was not available to malicious users. But we all know that injecting a buggy or unsecure PHP script is as easy as determining which variables it is accepting from the outside.

So, to be brief: ongoing average price for a professional programmer in Western industrialized countries is $60 or more. But prices of a market, like the one of vBulletin.org, is made by contractors and clients. So, how many professional teams or coders (the real ones, not those who call themselves programmers) would work in an environment were they are getting paid less than what they are being paid in other places?

My advices for clients:

1) Specify the budget range for your projects in the TITLE of the thread. Many think this is bad because coders will end up taking all your money, but many programmers will know you are serious when they see this. You will receive much more answers to your job request, EVEN if you are paying a relatively low price.
2) Ask the coder to show you websites he has worked for, with real scripts developed by them still being actively used by his/her users.
3) If your project is a high cost one, ask past clients about their experience with a coder.
4) NEVER NEVER NEVER go the cheap way if you are processing payments or collecting credit card information. This is an act of disrespect for your users, and it's asking for a lot of troubles, and possibly for the end of your online activity if all goes wrong.

Huh, Americans best coders? I don't think so. vBulletin is coded by British people :p

That's because the dollar is so weak against the Euro and pound that it seems a lot to you. Granted, $50 is about ?25 an hour in the UK which is a good wage, but it's not astronomical out here. You'd be hard pressed to find a decent and experienced contractor in the UK who would work for less than that.

Considering the price of a small flat in big cities in UK, I completely understand that.

So YOU say... :p

I think you'll find that not all the vb coders are British ;)

Hmmm, Scott must be Scottish then :)

What I don't get is, vbulletin are a British based, yet they use US phrases, and even use $ as the default currency :confused:.

It's because most of their market is in the US.