I've recently started to try and do some freelancing coding and such, but I realized that I have no clue what a fair price would be for anything, really. I was wondering what some average ballparks for any sort of work like this is?
I do html/css, some javascript, and some work with Flash. I just need to know what I should expect to ask for being new to this and all.
One metric I've heard used in the past is take the hourly rate equivalent you would make as a salaried employee, multiply by 2.5 to 3, and that should be your freelance rate. I do not use this, but that's a starting point. You might also look at salary.com for a start.
Most of the time you won't be charging hourly, it'll be per project.
To be honest, when I started I just decided a random fee that I wanted to make per hour and bidded on all my projects based on that. Quite often when freelancing online people will be happy paying a bit more for someone who (a) speaks good English and (b) doesn't go around addressing them "dear sir" (there are tons of indian developers that do this). Quite often your presentation is more important than your fee.
You might want to start out a bit on the cheap side to give you some opportunities to build up a portfolio & a relationship with your clients, as well as testimonials, to help you pull bigger projects.
Lots of good points in this thread. I've always told people who ask me what to charge what my first client told me. I was a noob, 19 year old programmer "playing around" with HTML at the time. My first client (a friend of my college roomates) ran a business that needed a web site. He told me to NEVER charge less than $20 / hr. So that's where I started.
Once I went into it full time, and picked up the extra taxes, paying all my benefits (health insurance, etc) I found that I needed to charge about 2.5 times my "salaried" hourly rate. Which, at the time worked out to about $50 / hr.
As you get more experience, you need to start looking at your rate as a value proposition. If you can provide services worth $150 - $250 / hr, then you can charge that.
Bottom line, you charge what the market will bare and what you're worth.
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