Payment for job question

I've got a client who wants me to "review" some code. It's a large News room type product that is probably about 90% finished. He needs someone to look through it and make sure it's optimized, clean, commented, etc.

It is organized into modules, so I'd be doing a module at a time. I really have no idea how much work it's going to require. I could be simple replacements and cleanup, or I may have to re-write entire sections of modules because what they have in inefficient or insecure.

I'm curious what recommendations you guys have for payment. I was thinking of setting 3 different prices, low, medium, and high. The low price would be used if the changes required are simple and the high price would be used if a lot of the module is required to be completely re-written.

Or I could just go with an hourly rate although it'd be a little hard to keep track of with my schedule.

Any comments?

---John Holmes...

I think I would give them a large price spread and then explain to them why you can't give them a closer figure. A lot of people "on the other end" don't understand that working through another programmers code can be extremely time consuming, especially since their goal is optimization / documentation. They need to know what you told us; it could be as simple as add a comment here or there, or as involved as rewriting entire modules.

I think they will be open to this. They are aware of the difficulty of what they're asking for. From the couple of pages I've seen so far, it may be a lot of work. Thanks for your comments.

---John Holmes...

Hourly. Hourly. Hourly. This is a CLASSIC hourly project.

Unless you feel like you want to do them a favor, you're going to get screwed on any sort of flat-rate scheme for a project like this.

Going through other people's code is a complete and total timesuck.

Indeed it is.