pricing for non-profiits

[lenglain]

Hi guys, Im about to set up a website for my first client. A small non profit group in NYC where I used to work (three man operation). The executive director wants me to draw up a formal proposal rather than just doing things informally between us. I've drawn up my entire proposal, saving pricing for last, and now im stumped. I have no idea what web designers charge, especially for non-profits and/or clients you know on a personal basis (if it was just a friend id do it free but since this is an organization im charging.) I was thinking of asking 500 up front for the website and then a monthly rate as i will be maintaining it 100%. I have no idea what to ask for a monthly rate. Am i being too modest? I was thinking of asking for 200 a month.

thanks for reading, hope to hear from y'all.

 

[sysgenmedia]

The question really depends on the details for the website you're setting up. Offhand, $500 seems a bit low for the NYC area (I'm based on long island). But it depends on the details. If it's just a quick 3 page website with little content / difficult design features, $500 may be on par.

If you're adding photo galleries, video galleries, contact forms, possible eCommerce, building on a CMS, etc... all of these things add up to more time / more money. Also, how difficult is it to work with these guys. Do you expect that they'll be easy to work with or will they be incredibly picky and make you go through multiple re-workings of designs, features, etc?

As for maintenance, you would probably be best served by figuring out what you'd like to earn as an hourly rate and charging based on that. I'd be hesitant to just say "$XX gets you unlimited updates" as that can quickly get out of hand.

Something that's worked well for us it to try arranging a deal where they get up to X amount of hours of your time for Y dollars, after that they can pay hourly (at a probably higher rate). So say you want to make $35 an hour (fairly randomly chosen, this is up to you in the end), propose something like $175 a month for up to 5 hours of work, afterwards $40 per hour.