Last week I did a post about this on LinkedIn and people reacted well; so I said, I'll write a short article about this.
I've been freelancing for around 4 years now and in all this time, I've come to realize quite a few things about rates, money, etc. I'll share those things with you today.
Let's start by making a quick comparison between an employee and a freelancer in terms of money & benefits. A freelancer doesn't have:
🚫 paid holidays
🚫 medical/life/... insurance
🚫 gym subscription
🚫 free courses/training
🚫 free coffee/water/food
🚫 any kind of benefit
So, usually, a freelancer has to pay for all the above and:
💳 taxes
💳 bills (internet, electricity, ...)
💳 subscriptions (services that help him run his business)
💳 equipment (laptop, monitor, headset, mouse, ...)
In addition to all of this, a freelancer has to take care of:
👨💻 client communication
👨💻 proposals
👨💻 estimates
👨💻 marketing
👨💻 sales
👨💻 finances (invoices, payments, ...)
👨💻 and much more
When you set your hourly rate, you need to take all of that into account.
From a Client perspective, hiring a freelancer will simplify your cost per employee a lot. You no longer have to think about the things mentioned above (taxes, paid holiday, insurance, coffee, ...) and you can just think about the invoice you get from the freelancer.
Hiring a freelancer will not only simplify the process but will also make you pay less. Let's look at this article Cost of Hiring Full-Time vs. Freelance Software Developers. You can go ahead and read the full article, it's very interesting. But let's look at the numbers: the cost to hire a full-time developer with 5 years of experience is $198,974 and the cost to hire a freelance developer with 5 years of experience is $107,400 - $179,000 (based on his hourly rate). For a more detailed breakdown of those prices, go ahead and read the article above.
To sum everything up, as a business, you could save up to almost 50% by hiring freelancers instead of full-time employees!
Now that we clarified some things, let's try and destroy a mith
If a freelancer gets $100, he will keep $100
That's totally wrong. Depending on the country you're in you'll have to pay taxes, after that you'll have to cover different expenses covered above (bills, subscriptions, equipment, ...).
Extra: set your hourly rate
If you're a freelancer / want to become a freelancer and have no idea how to set your rate, a simple thing you can do is think of your salary. Let's assume $2880 for this example (this is your net salary). We want to get your gross salary now. Let's say the employer has to pay 40% in taxes, so if you have a $2880 net salary this means your gross salary is $4800. Divide that by 160 (the number of workable hours in a month). This will get you a $30 hourly rate. You can use this technique as a starting point.
Let me know what you think about this subject in the comments 👇🏻
If you want to reach me, check out my website.
Top comments (1)
Hello, as a freelancer myself i can give some hints.
But remind yourself that freelancing in western europe can be very different than eastern one or than western america etc...
So everything can be different depending on your country.
When it comes to freelancing, a lot of people may want to do it for many different reasons. Here is a short list (not exhaustive) :
Some tips that apply to western europe :
Here is an exemple, in France, Paris :