hourlyrate

What do you tell your customers when they ask: "How long will it take?"

I charge my clients by the hour when building them websites. It's the only reasonable way for me to do it without either ripping them off, or ripping myself off. They always ask: "How many hours do you think it will take?" and I usually don't know what to tell them without stressing myself out by putting myself on a time line. What do yo...

When programming for an hourly rate, should you keep the timer running while processing code automatically in the background?

This is probably subjective as it is a dilemma between what is good for you and what is good for your customer, but I as a programmer, would really like to know what is the commonly accepted way of doing this. I will keep these answers to my question in mind for future projects. I've personally never sold any of my work using a set rate...