Quoted a lab a fixed price and got "very high, getting other quotes." how bad did i misprice this?
TL;DR: I usually bill this client $20/hr. They're a company based in Ontario. I quoted $3.5k / $5.2k / $7.4k for a stats dashboard that I also have to host on their server, wire into their messy setup, and make reachable remotely over a VPN. He said too high and that he's shopping around. Was it overpriced, or did I just pitch it badly?
I do small jobs for a lab that tracks production stats, at about $20/hr. I'm in a cheaper country, the client isn't. They asked for a fixed price to replace a Grafana board that only shows today's files, plus some PHP cron reports that fail without anyone noticing.
Their infra is a mess:
- exports land in a shared folder
- old scripts and cron jobs nobody really owns
- reports to management that break silently
- no backups
- no docs on how any of it fits together
I'd be installing and hosting it on their own machine, not my own server. On top of that I'd set up remote viewing and a VPN on their side so a few people can open it from outside the building and I can support it remotely.
What I quoted:
- $3,500: 3 desktop pages, with history, date ranges, compare to the previous period, filters, live reading of their export folder, and a nightly backup.
- $5,200: the above, plus phone and TV layouts, exports, and saved views.
- $7,400: the above, plus logins and roles, admin screens, an activity log, and the remote access and VPN.
Email reports and alerts were optional on top.
His reply: "very high to my understanding, getting a couple of other quotes."
Questions:
- What would you charge for the 3-page version, given that hosting and setup are on their server?
- Does being in a cheaper country matter, or do you price for the client's market?
- Do I send a smaller, cheaper quote before his other quotes come in, or does that make my first quote look made up?