When I left my job to become a freelance programmer, I was charging $50/hr in the beginning. I met other freelancers, consultants, and agencies in town, and a few of them charged $150/hr. Even the agency that I had worked at previously billed my time at $120/hr, which means that my level of programming skill was not the deciding factor. If they could charge that much for my services, why couldn’t I? There was a broken record in my head asking me the same question:
“what’s the difference between a $50 freelancer and a $150 freelancer?”
So I decided to start spending time learning about pricing, value, and all that “business stuff” programmers and designers love to avoid.