Hello everyone,
Would any one have more or less a handle on prices for website development in France (Europe), as I imagine it not the same as in the US.
Let’s say for example a 5 page site for starters. What ball park figure would my European colleagues would contemplate a job of this size?
I am not looking for freelancers, just some ballpark information.
Thanks.
Hi Ricardo. Difficult to say without knowing how elaborate these pages would be. But I would guess about 1.200,- € or 7.800 FRF at least…
These times are over 😉
You’re right, that’s much too cheap… 😉
Thanks Mathias.
I know that the trick is on the details. I just really needed a ball park.
As details, I also added Ecwid and did in Wordpress.
For years, I have successfully priced my work according to the type of client. To use your ballpark 5 pager as guide:
What many designers don’t realise is that if you pitch for a job for an SME or large organisation at your “local” prices, they will not even consider you. You would not get the job just because your price is too low and they will see that as inexperience.
Why are local government or NGAs the most expensive?
I have worked with this category many times over the years and every single time they are a royal pain in the arse. To get any extra money after your accepted price is nigh impossible. Too many “stakeholders” with differing subjective ideas which you have to politely take on board and delicately handle in order to steer your long and weary path to finally getting paid. These tasks will take three+ times longer to complete - guaranteed 😃
Finally, 99.9% of the world don’t have our skills. Don’t be cheap - be competitive.
Thanks for the detailed information, it helps me compare with prices in the us.
I realise this is going off topic, but hopefully that’s Ok as Ricardo has got the info he needs.
With regards to pricing, there is another way to look at this, and I’m always surprised that more don’t consider it…
Getting a nice big chunk upfront to build a website is always nice, but many people then hand the addional income that the websites you build can generate to someone else. What am I talking about? Hosting. And in a lot of cases, maintenance.
This is not aimed at anyone in particular, but If you, as a web developer, don’t run your own servers and host the client sites you build, you are seriously missing a trick. I host 90% of the sites I build, at a cost of roughly €25-50 a month. This means once the site is out the door and paid for, I continue to get a nice little payment every month, for as long as the site is active. I’ve sites built ten years ago for which I charged €400, but in that time they’ve generated me €3k of regular income, for almost zero workload. Multiply that by a lot of sites, and soon enough it mounts up.
Last year was quiet for me on the web front. Partly because I was busy on other projects and partly because the web business was very slow for me. But thanks to my hosting income I still had a nice trickle of money, which meant I didn’t really have to worry about the lack of paying work.
The next thing is maintenance. When I build a new site for a client I explain to them that most sites need maintaining, and regularly updating, so as to keep them fresh and appealing. To cover this I have a range of monthly contracts, ranging from €30-500 a month. For this they get a set amount of my time each month for updates etc.
It’s normally really easy to upsell a new client from the basic monthly hosting fee to say, €50 a month, to include 30mins of update time per month. Once they are spending over €100 a month the hosting is free, which is another incentive for them to add more monthly time to the their contract, and save the €25 hosting fee.
Generally speaking, this is all really easy to do, it’s just takes a bit of salemanship. The result is that site you built for that client is going to continue to earn you money every month, of every year.
If you are like most, and only make your money when you build the initial site, it’s worth having a good think about your business model. Because it’s highly likely you are giving money away to someone else.
Many years ago I was involved with a process to update the website for a professional association (NPAO.org). We solicited bids from 5 of the top site developers in Toronto at that time (2012). A requirements document was submitted to them - and all the bids that came back were very close in pricing: $50k Canadian at that time. We chose one supplier by analyzing what they recommended as a solution vs what their own web site did. As an example, they all recommended that images had alt tags - but not all of them used alt-tags on their own site images. So we developed a list of criteria and a points structure - and one of the submitters came out on top.