How much to charge for freelance python code [closed]

Question

I have a question about the going rate for freelance Python programming.

Here's the situation: I work full-time in marketing but I have been a freelance web developer since 2005. My marketing company is getting a new website and our previous development company wants to charge nearly $4000 to access our old database to migrate the data over to the new site. However, I know that I can build an html scraper with Python to get all of the necessary data into a spreadsheet, to be uploaded to the new site. (I built a prototype in about 90 minutes and it works.)

My problem is that this is far outside my job description and I want my company to contract me to hand over this code. I don't want to charge by the hour because the fact that I was able to do this quickly is based on 15+ years of experience (a common issue with hourly rates in web development, I know). I want to save them money—so I want to charge less than the $4000 that the old development company is charging—but I also want to be fair to the work that I've done and to industry standards.

What seems like a reasonable price for this?

Answer 1

A reasonable price for that would be the salary that they are already paying you to do your job. Any other demands for money are likely to go down very badly with your management.

Answer 2

Looking at it from your employer's viewpoint; For an unspecified amount (lets say $1K), you can scrape the site to get the data.

1. There's no guarantee that you'll get all the data. You can only scrape the site to get data which is visible on the website. There may be data in the database which is not shown, but legally required to be stored somewhere (depends on jurisdiction, of course).
2. There's no guarantee that your code will work. They don't know you as a programmer, and they don't know the quality of your work. A 90 minute prototype is not the same as a fully tested solution.
3. They would have to set you up as a supplier on their accounts system - that will cause extra work for the finance people, and they may have problems with you being an employee and a supplier at the same time.
4. The company obviously don't have access to their own data - the question then is, do they even own it? If not, then from a legal viewpoint, stealing it back is still stealing. That's one for the attorneys, and a full legal answer would cost more than $4K...

If they let the existing developers do the work, they'll pay about $3K extra. But... they'll have guarantees that the data will be there, and accurate. If not, they will have no issues or qualms about suing the company. The company is already set up as a supplier, so there are no extra hoops to run through. And while they are working on the extract, you can be doing your normal day job and earning money for the company. This - even though it looks expensive to you - is the cost-effective way of obtaining this data (the issue of why your company didn't have access to it's own data is another question, and one that they should address before commissioning a new site...)

Answer 3

Contract with your previous web development company to do the work for them, so they can collect the $4,000, and arrange for them to give you half. Then you make money and they make money and your employer never needs to know.

But that's not an entirely serious suggestion. My serious suggestion is just to do it as part of your normal job, show your company what you can do, make a note of it later when you have your year-end review and use it to leverage a raise.

This is what I did. My company was paying $500,000 USD per year to a data vendor to buy their data. I was able to scrape the data for free (also using Python). I thought about having my friend, who is also a developer, set up an LLC that could scrape the data using my code, collect it, and sell it back to my company at a small discount compared to the vendor. My company would have gone for it. They'd never have known that I was in cahootz with the LLC.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm not sure, I was too honest to do that and I ended up just leveraging the raise.

Answer 4

Whilst I admire your initiative, unfortunately I think your approach is a bit naive. I'll explain why I think that:

• Firstly if you're migrating data from one site to another, it's typically not just a collection of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files but includes database(s) as well.
• If the website's content is stored in a CMS (e.g. Drupal, WordPress or similar) then it might have quite a lot of metadata associated with it (e.g. categorisation etc), that is quite important. Not just the raw html.
• If the website is using a CMS then there also might be a number of users, roles and content moderation workflows that need to be set up as well.
• You've mentioned that the $4k is to provide access to the database not static web data. Do you have a copy of the database schema? Do you know that it only contains scrapable content?
• Assuming for a moment that you enjoy your job and you're being fairly paid, why would you want to charge your existing employer a fee to migrate their own data? I doubt many employers would enter into a "contract supplier" relationship with an existing employee. If they felt you were capable then I'd expect that your employer would expect you to do this within the scope of your role.

In short, I think that you might be looking at the data migration exercise from an overly simplistic and/or superficial perspective. Btw $4k is very cheap in my experience to do this type of work. Especially if it includes any degree of data cleansing.

If you're adament that your skills and experience qualifies you to challenge the supplier's approach on the data migration then you could always ask to be involved in the planning conversation with the supplier. But if you challenge them on their approach you might impact your company's relationship with that supplier from a trust perspective.

Answer 5

You might offer to do the job without any additional charge (during work time). Of course this has the disadvantage that you do not get extra money. But career wise it may be a boost at your current company, you can make a very good impression and you can prove that you have skills outside of your current responsibilities. In the long run this could pay off.