what should I charge for this side gig

Question

This is not really technical but I could not find a better place to ask this Question than SO.

I have a full time gig but recently someone I know wanted to get an application done that would send mass emails/texts to users who are related to a particular group.

I am an OK RoR developer so have decided to do it in RoR. Following is brief overview of the functionality:

• Login
• CRUD Groups
• CRUD Users (related to groups)
• CRUD Notifications (email / sms)
• Screens for displaying when last notification was sent to a particular group etc.
• Unsubscribe link in the emails pointing back to the application
• be on https
• set up the whole app on their network (Windows server)
• Code will belong to him
• NDA signed
• finished in 3-4 weeks

Initially I had asked the client for around 1K for the whole thing but I had told him that it will be set up on heroku. I think setting up the application on Windows server should be outside of the cost as it is more work.

This is my first side gig so I would like a second opinion from experienced folks out there.

Answer 1

I look at this project has having three phases

1. Development of application
2. Installation and configuration of application on site
3. Transfer ownership of the code base to the customer.

Phases one and two are your time investments. Three to four weeks means something to the customer, but what does that mean to you? Is that a 40 hour week, or is that 20 hours? Translate it into an hours estimate for yourself and then multiply that by how much you want per hour. I think $25 an hour is a good price for development on a basic CRUD application. Now, phase three is something else. To be honest, you need to document your code well (which you needed to do anyway), but the comments need to make sense to someone other than yourself.