Pricing is always a sensitive question, and is not always what it seems. More important than what a particular firm charges is what you get for that price. There are a lot of different strategies for pricing, often it is the goal to ofescate what a project will end up costing. Sometimes, there is hidden pricing, sometimes, there are ten thousand different prices for what may seem like the same thing (read a credit card bill!). Always, pricing is a factor of how much profit a firm wants to make verses what the market will bare.
We promise upfront pricing, and we mean it. All of our pricing is based on an hourly rate, as we do time billing. I am not a marketing wizard, and we don't make any money selling products or services we don't produce (except a little on hosting and domain products, more on that later). So, even if we are doing a project with a fixed budget, we base our proposals on an estimated number of hours to complete that project. Simple to calculate, simple to understand. Now, not every service call is estimated out, and we have become pretty good at understanding how much time it will take to complete certain tasks. For instance, we often asked to replace a hard drive on a computer. I know that whether it is a laptop or a desktop or a server, there are always certain steps that we are going to take: backup the drive, replace the drive, re-install the OS, migrate the data to the new drive. Unless we run into something strange, like some RAID configuration, this is going to take about 2 hours of labor. So, I am confident that when I quote $200 for the job, we are going to come in at or below $200. And yes, if it is a very simple job (like minimal or no data to transfer), we will only charge for the time used. This is how we came up with the pricing for our Web Site Estimator we used our experience building the various kinds of Web sites to estimate the number of hours that it should take and BOOM, there is our price. Now, before we start on a Web site, or any other larger project, we will consult with the customer to determine the true requirements, and base our estimate on that. Often times, it is not clear how much time a job will take, and if we need to make adjustments to the estimate, we will do so BEFORE we put in the work. Simple, right? We feel that, when compared to other firms, our rates are in the lower have of what is commonly charged. Yes, sometimes, their per service charge LOOKS less, but when you compare what they are doing for that service, we are doing a lot more for the money.