What I Charge and Why
Pricing transparency from an independent engineer.
I get the pricing question every week, and most founders are too polite to ask it directly. Here's exactly what I charge, what I won't take below, and why the math has to work that way.
Founders ask me about pricing, then apologise for asking. Don't apologise. It's the most important question in any first call, and the answer is usually the difference between us working together and us wasting each other's time.
So here it is, written down once, so I can stop dancing around it.
My current rates (April 2024)
- Architecture audit, fixed scope: $8,500 flat. Two weeks. One engineer (me). Deliverable is a written report, a recorded walkthrough, and a 90-minute follow-up.
- Build engagements, retainer: $14,500/month for 60-65 focused hours. Three month minimum.
- Fractional CTO, ongoing: $9,000/month for one full day per week plus async availability.
- Day rate for one-off problem solving: $2,400/day, two day minimum.
I don't do hourly under 4 hours. I don't do "just a quick call" under $400. I don't do equity-only.
Why those numbers
I worked at large regulated banks for five years before going independent. Banks billed my time, internally, at roughly $2,800 to $3,400 per day depending on the project loading. The market knows what a senior Java engineer with regulated-finance experience costs. I haven't invented these rates. I've just stopped letting an employer keep the spread.
The math from my side:
- Effective billable days per year, after sales, admin, vacation, training, and being sick: about 140.
- Target gross revenue: $340K-$380K.
- That requires an average effective rate of about $2,500/day.
Below $2,000/day, I'm losing money relative to going back to a bank. So I won't.
What you actually pay for
Most clients think they're paying for code. They're paying for three things:
- Decisions that compound. A bad database choice in month 2 costs you four engineering months in year 2. I've watched it happen. I get those choices right because I've shipped them in regulated environments where rollback is expensive.
- Pattern recognition from production failures. I've been on call for systems moving real money. Most of what looks like "good engineering" is just having seen the failure mode before.
- Cycle time. When you hire me to architect a service, it's running in production within the engagement window. Not "designed". Running.
What you don't pay for
- Endless Slack availability. I check Slack twice a day, and I'm explicit about it.
- Pretty Notion documents. I write Architecture Decision Records, in the repo, in markdown. That's the deliverable.
- Heroics. If we hit a deadline by burning weekends, I priced wrong, and that's on me. I'd rather adjust scope.
When I'm cheap and when I'm expensive
I'm cheap if you have a clear problem, technical leadership in place, and you need a senior pair of hands for 8-12 weeks. The cost of getting it wrong with someone less experienced is much higher than my rate.
I'm expensive if you're a 50-person team with strong staff engineers and you just need extra capacity. Hire two mid-level engineers full-time. They'll outproduce me at half the cost.
The one rate I'll never quote
"What's your best price?"
I don't have one. The rates above are the rates. If they don't work for your budget, I'll happily refer you to two or three engineers I trust who charge less, and they're excellent. That's not a sales tactic. That's just how I want to operate.
The sharper insight
The mistake most independents make is discounting on the first engagement to win the client. I used to do this. It permanently anchors the relationship. Year two, when you try to raise to market, the client treats it as a price hike rather than a correction.
Quote your real rate on day one. The clients who say no were never going to be good clients. The clients who say yes treat you like a peer from the first meeting.
If you want to start a conversation about an engagement, the contact page is the fastest way. If you want to scope something formally, start a project here.