[vbullfan]

Princeton, I read your excellent article before posting this thread. I thought it was a great piece.

If I may, I have one point of contention with your article. You say that it is best to price the work on a "per project" basis. From my experience, project based pricing always results in someone getting the short end of the stick. Either the project is easier or harder than first imagined, it never goes exactly as planned. So if it is easier, the client is screwed, if it is harder, the developer is screwed. If the project is way harder than first imagined (which in my experience is 80% of the time) then what ends up happening is the developer says "forget this, this isn't what I signed up for" and the project falls to pieces.

For these reasons I much prefer to pay on a per hour basis. Paying per hour usually results in a fair deal. And I believe it also puts the developer and the client on the same objective. For instance, the client doesn't want to make last minute changes because he knows he has to pay for them, and the developer doesn't do a rush job at the end because he knows he is being paid for his efforts. Also, if the scope of the project changes mid stream (which happens often) the flexibility of the per hour payment wont cause the problems that a per project pricing would.

My points here are mainly regarding larger projects, and I realize that you were probably geared more toward smaller jobs in your article. I'm not so much disagreeing with you as I am trying to share what (little) knowledge I have