I'd say that for 20 hours project, it's generally not worth the hassle to bill hourly.
For small tasks people want to know what they're on the hook for, but once you go into the larger scopes with more variables and properly price your risks, you'd notice their reaction is much less welcoming.
I don't know the exact nature of your work - is this just doing generalized programming work, or do you specialize in something (e.g. setting up a Wordpress site)? If what you do is repeatable enough, at some point you'd make good money working per project because you'll become much more effective.
Of course it's more difficult to pull off when you do generalized work.
This however has one very significant exception, and that's when dealing with a corporate client which would lead to more work.
You see, any company that's larger than 20 employees separates the financial management from the technical staff. That means that if you've made it through negotiations and contract work setting an hourly framework with the financial side of the company, you're now another tool at the disposal of the technical people which could utilize you almost on a whim.
With a project based setting you need to go almost to square one and renegotiate all the way down every time you want more work. It's not just a hassle for you - it's a hassle for the engineers who'd love to use your help.
This, eventually, is what builds you a recurring revenue stream; making yourself available to the technical people at minimal friction. I've been responsible for a pretty significant corporate operation where my team was responsible for procurement of products and services the size of a respectable startup A round, and dealing with vendor onboarding, scope of work, legal approvals and financial signing at the VP/CFO level were a huge time waste. Contractors who billed hourly were much simpler to work with - waste time once and be on your merry way for months at a time.
I try remembering that now when I crossed sides, back to consulting. Try make the life of the people who need your services as easy as possible - usually you'll have mutual interests.
That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
> I don't know the exact nature of your work - is this just doing generalized programming work, or do you specialize in something (e.g. setting up a Wordpress site)?
I have no idea. I'm just applying to every doable looking short job on Upwork posted a by client that doesn't scream sketchy or terrible to work with (eg they've hired more than five people and rated every one less than two, or they say they want to run deploy code to other people's computers remotely but will only give details over another channel).
By doable I mean looks like I'll only have to learn two or three new things. For example, I just finished figuring out how to make a basic Netlify cloud function that will take data from the Google Sheets API (two new things) but the next step, parsing the cells and plugging it into a template, is something I've done before.
I'm thinking of becoming a Shopify specialist because the dev experience seems so pleasant, but I wonder if I'd be better off learning something more unpleasant to work with because there might be less competition.
I don't know the exact nature of your work - is this just doing generalized programming work, or do you specialize in something (e.g. setting up a Wordpress site)? If what you do is repeatable enough, at some point you'd make good money working per project because you'll become much more effective. Of course it's more difficult to pull off when you do generalized work.
This however has one very significant exception, and that's when dealing with a corporate client which would lead to more work.
You see, any company that's larger than 20 employees separates the financial management from the technical staff. That means that if you've made it through negotiations and contract work setting an hourly framework with the financial side of the company, you're now another tool at the disposal of the technical people which could utilize you almost on a whim.
With a project based setting you need to go almost to square one and renegotiate all the way down every time you want more work. It's not just a hassle for you - it's a hassle for the engineers who'd love to use your help.
This, eventually, is what builds you a recurring revenue stream; making yourself available to the technical people at minimal friction. I've been responsible for a pretty significant corporate operation where my team was responsible for procurement of products and services the size of a respectable startup A round, and dealing with vendor onboarding, scope of work, legal approvals and financial signing at the VP/CFO level were a huge time waste. Contractors who billed hourly were much simpler to work with - waste time once and be on your merry way for months at a time. I try remembering that now when I crossed sides, back to consulting. Try make the life of the people who need your services as easy as possible - usually you'll have mutual interests.