Pricing Model

Hi all,

I'm going to propose a pricing model for web portal to my clients, but I have no experiences dealing with that ?


OK,what sits in my mind is like this, I'll break the web portals into parts like :

1. Content Management System
2. Poll
3. User Management
4. Image gallery


Take POLL for example
I'll divided into 2 parts :-
a. Poll Engine on the live web
b. Poll admin module

For part a , it will take around 5 man hours include design,flow and testing.

So I will totalled up the whole project man hours, say 140 man hours. From that I can calculate the price. Say my price is USD1 per hour and I will get USD140.00 for the whole project.

That's all...

And your question is. . .

Assuming you're asking if this is a good methodology, then yes, this seems OK.

Couple of things:

Projects ALWAYS take longer than you think they will initially. Estimate your time, and then double it. Really.

Give a client a flat amount- don't break down what each section costs individually- they will be more likely to drop non-essential things, meaning you'll be out money. Make sure your scope-of-work is very explicit as to what is included in the price- A few hours spelling it out explicitly could save your dozens of hours coding a "feature" that kind of fits in to a loosely worded contract.

Totally - and then some. Your pricing strategy should go hand in hand with your lifecycle approach. I had a little chat about this idea in this thread Add 10% for project management (uhh) assuming your project has more than one person and also think about liason/engagement. How much time are you going to spend just talking with your client?

So to price a project you need from your client a Terms of Reference. THis is something you can help them with but would include the project scope, deliverables, requirements etc... Scope is so important because otherwise you might always be adding stuff. A TOR gives you something to work from to start building, at least in you (and your team's?) head, an overall solution architecture and project plan. Project plan follows your lifecycle with estimated time frames, components etc... Once you have your overall time is just a matter of multiplying by your hourly rate as you have mentioned

Good luck, Z.