Hourly billing uses hours to measure productivity and rates to commoditize your work.
Presumption: For an Access developer (in general) they should get an average hourly rate of $X.
If that Access developer wants to make more money he or she must either work more hours, or raise his or her hourly rates. There is no other option.
Hourly rates have a ceiling. Once you hit say $200, your sales start to get way more difficult. Customers will ask and seek discounts whenever they can on your hourly rate. Let’s say you want to raise your hourly rate to $1000. Haha! Nope. No one would pay that as it would be way above what they could pay what they would consider the best Access developer in the world.
Customers ask for hourly estimates or for you to work within a budget or for you to hit a due date. If you go over any of those, they get very unhappy and you lose trust and working with them becomes more difficult.
For an honest Access developer who won’t charge for more hours than you say (and you ARE an honest Access developer, right? I am and I expect the developers I work with to be as well) then you have a built in max salary, and this gets even trickier when you’re managing a team of developers.
Hourly billing is just asking for customers to devalue for time while asking for more of it. It leads to silly practices like, I’ll give you more hours at a discounted rate. What? I WANT to work MORE hours for LESS money?
It disincentivizes me to work efficiently. After all, why bother looking for ways to work faster when I need to work more hours for the client to get ahead. If I end up becoming super efficient and my hourly rate stays the same, all I end up doing is requiring myself to find more jobs and more clients to make the same amount of money I made before. Actually, I will make less because I’ve got to spend more time doing sales to find more clients.
So yes, I think hourly billing IS nuts. Why am I moaning about it? Because I haven’t figured out how to make my way out of it yet into a more product based, subscription based, or value based set of products. I’m spending too many hours working on client projects to research and develop products that could rescue me from this crazy loop!
So are you on the gilded hamster wheel as well, or have you found your way out to make a sustainable living selling products or services in some other way?
Personally, I’m a fan of billing per project. You set up goals in advance – in writing – and give the customer a set price for the project. It’s fair to you, and to the client. The problem is that it takes experience to know how long it’s going to actually take you to build something.
See this article: https://daedtech.com/every-billable-hour-is-amateur-hour/