All I'm really saying is that "hours" is the wrong unit to negotiate prices in:
* $400/hour sounds expensive to anybody. But $32,000 might be cheap as far as project budgets go.
* Conceding $400 -> $350 is, first of all, more expensive than it sounds, and second of all is a concession that will last endure across all your projects. On the other hand, there are many levers you can pull to get $32,000 to $27,500 if that's where the client's budget needs to be.
At the end of the day, your "hourly rate" doesn't mean anything. Clients don't buy "hours", they buy outcomes (or checkboxes). Thinking about things in terms of your hourly rate is a good way to box yourself into bad engagements.
We obviously do a lot of reversing work too, and of course we bill for it --- it's part of the "Discovery" phase of projects that require it. There've been a few times when I've had to bust out IDA or a debugger to write a proposal, but they are rare.
$400/hour sounds expensive to anybody. But $32,000 might be cheap as far as project budgets go.
I think the use cases you describe are very different from most of us. You said you could spend upto 3 days just working on a proposal. For some of us, 3 days of billed work with one client is the average size of a complete project. Can you see then how it may not be efficient to spend a day just working on a proposal and spec'ing things?
Like you, I always believed that as a client you pay me to achieve objectives--not hit keystrokes on my keyboard. In the past two months, I've refunded or canceled three fixed-price projects where it was simply cheaper for me to end it than proceed. One of them involved over 40 hours of work when my initial estimate was that it would be a 20 hour project. I refunded the guy's original deposit.
It's easy to say that I am just underquoting. But no matter what quote I give, I feel it's rather arbitrary given I cannot invest time like you to really delve deep into the project and get a real sense of the work involved. I have gone the whole "I am not going to underquote" route and after doing that for a sample set of projects, my post-martem revealed that I was either overbilling or underbilling clients. In essence I had some clients subsidizing the other clients.
This past week I've been working on my first "by the hour" gig. I've put in over 80 hours in the last 10 days. It's been a living hell for me work-wise. But at least I know I'll be compensated for it! And fairly! There was no way I could quote this client a flat fee and c
Additionally, if someone is hiring a contractor, that contractor may have a rate of $x/hr, but the customer is most likely going to pay them monthly because it's so much easier to work larger numbers into a fixed budget.
* $400/hour sounds expensive to anybody. But $32,000 might be cheap as far as project budgets go.
* Conceding $400 -> $350 is, first of all, more expensive than it sounds, and second of all is a concession that will last endure across all your projects. On the other hand, there are many levers you can pull to get $32,000 to $27,500 if that's where the client's budget needs to be.
At the end of the day, your "hourly rate" doesn't mean anything. Clients don't buy "hours", they buy outcomes (or checkboxes). Thinking about things in terms of your hourly rate is a good way to box yourself into bad engagements.
We obviously do a lot of reversing work too, and of course we bill for it --- it's part of the "Discovery" phase of projects that require it. There've been a few times when I've had to bust out IDA or a debugger to write a proposal, but they are rare.