Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
Call me overly cautious, but I don't think this is a topic for discussion...
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Acollusion
You're overly cautious. There's a huge difference between discussing what goes into setting a price or expressing opinion on what is a valid price, and collusion. Besides, even if a few designers/developers try to fix prices, it won't work; there's too much competition. Price fixing is only relevant when consumers are effected by impeding the free market.
Another difference is that the question is what people "are" charging, not what they should charge. To answer that question, there are no real standards which I'm aware of.
What you need to ask yourself is what is your time worth. And don't forget to include the percentage of your time spent off the clock doing skills development (such as reading this list), sales and marketing, and administration.
What the market is will to pay and what it expects to pay are important, too. I have a friend who's a lawyer. When he first started out he was charging low prices. He soon realized that by raising his prices he would get more business because people had expectations of what a skilled lawyer charges, a one who charges less mustn't be that good. The same is sometimes true for us, except that often people don't understand the difference between a skilled professional and a high school kid who can hack out some HTML, or worse, they think they understand all there is to know and then try to tell us how to do our jobs!
*****************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
*****************************************************
