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Hello everyone Iam a CAD Designer and I am considering doing independent design work. Can somebody tell me how much to charge per hour? I'll also like to have some advice from people who are independent designers. Any advice at all would be sincerely appreciated.
How much you charge may depend upon what you are doing for someone, what your credentials are, how much you are dependent on the work (do you have a day job?), and how clear you can make your clients / customers understand their own responsibilities. That last is fairly important ... if the customer expects you to make changes for free you're in for trouble. They're either going to be dissatisfied with you or you are going to be dissatisfied with them.
You can figure that your competition is going to be charging a minimum of $55 an hour for design work. Highly qualified engineers and designers doing demanding work will probably be charging twice that or more. There are a couple of schools of thought on the subject of how much one should charge relative to your competition ... one says that you should be as cheap or cheaper to be competitive and the the other says that the more you charge the more you'll be valued and sought after. I don't know which is right. If I was completely dependent on this kind of thing (I'm not -- I have a day job) then I'd be following the latter philosophy. I HAVE been completely dependent on it and I can say that the former philosophy gets only limited success and has very little "cushion" for lean times. Doing it part time I continue to follow the former philosophy and price my work per hour competitively with the low end of the spectrum. In a recession, it's probably the best way to go, I figure.
If you decide to bid on something like machine design at a fixed fee, then figure up the amount of time you believe it would take you and multiply that by 2 1/2. THEN multiply by a better rate than you would charge by the hour. If you are doing product design like plastics, don't even consider bidding on a fixed fee basis. And don't consider doing product design with stuff that is flexible (like fabrics) unless you are really brave and don't mind a lot of pain.
Whatever you do, gin up a sheet which indicates how you are charging and what the customer can expect from you (see the Costs link on my Web site). Also gin up a good non-disclosure / non-compete document. I can give you an example if you email. If you do structural design, get yourself plentiful liability coverage.
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