Upgrade Pricing on ColdFusion Builder 2

So, maybe I'm late to the game wih this, but I was just on Adobe.com and happended to look at ColdFusion Builder 2 in the store and saw they now offer upgrade pricing for Builder if you have any of the following:

Freelance Pay Scale - What should you charge

So, this started out as a bit of a brain dump on the AZCFUG.org mailing list when someone asked what the going rate is for a ColdFusion Developer these days. I recieved a lot of positive feedback on it, so I thought it might be a good idea to share on here.

A good baseline for picking a rate is:

Take what you earn a year, say, $60,000

You work about 2000 hrs a year, so your hourly rate there is about $30 an hour

Being a full time employee has it's advantages (usually..) Steady pay, health insurance, paid time off... You get the idea.

Those "benefits" have a literal value, say roughly equal to your pay.

So as a baseline number, double whatever your assumed hourly rate a full time job would be, in this case somewhere around $60 hour

I then usually add or subtract based on the job itself: Taking over someone else's evil, poorly coded project that looks like a nightmare, I add 50% - 100%

If it's something cool that I've never done before and I can learn from it, I might discount it some.

Also, factor in that you need to pay taxes on this income (we all report all of our side income, Right???) So, assume your going to lose about 40% of the money you make.

The volume of work (guaranteed work), my availability, possible perks (free stuff they make or sell), how tight or loose their deadlines are, do they seem cool or are they going to be a pain in the a**, should all factor into that pricing.

(Comments added by Cheryl Novalis-Marine)
I think you also need to consider Industry and size of the company (maybe even more so than the location). I have a long time client out of Manhattan NY, but they are a smaller company and because they are in NYC they have a lot of high expenses. No way they would be able to pay $200/hour. So, lots of things to factor in when deciding.

At the end of all of that, look at how much money you stand to take home once the job is done, is it worth the time/effort/stress

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Viewing by month: May 2010

GeoCoder v0.1 released

Posted by | Posted on May 31, 2010

Category : ColdFusion

After many years of playing around with Google Maps and the Google Maps API, I've finally built a marker admin tool that I'm fairly happy with. The new Google Maps v3 JavaScript API is light years ahead of the previous version and much more like the Action Script one. Using the cleaner simple tools and APIs they opened up I was able to put this rough demo together in less than 30 minutes. In short, this is the beginnings of the prototype for a set of tools to create and manage marker points for Google Maps.

The tool is pretty basic right now, you can view all of the markers that have been added so far (the map defaults to the Phoenix area) you can add a new marker by either entering an address / city / zip code / well known landmark or by right clicking anywhere on the map and the application will automatically go out and reverse geo-code the Lat/Lng to create an address. Once you have a marker on the map, you can fine tune it's location by dragging it, then you can add some notes about the marker and save it to the database. The notes and the address will show up on the front end demo map in the info window.

Here is a short list of the features I plan to add to the next revision:

A tool to manage previously saved maker points
User selectable marker icons
1. At the very least a way to choose what color marker icon to use
2. Someday, the ability to select from a user controlled library of custom marker icons, such as company logos. Useful for things like Hotel Brands, etc...
The ability to create multiple maps and assign markers to them independently
A better front end map the pulls it's marker data in a cleaner way. Using CF to hardcode the array of markers just seems wrong, I know I can get them in an XML format using jQuery...
The ability to selectively filter groups of markers out of the display on the front end based on criteria entered in on the backend. Imagine this was used for a real estate app and you only wanted houses with 3 bedrooms...
A decent skin for the UI...

Here is the demo, comments are appreciated.