How much to charge for a small amount of web design work?

My sister works for a very small law firm in Arizona and her boss wanted some changes made to their website. All that was done was a line of text was removed from three pages, changed out one image, and changed some text on one page. The total amount of time it took me to do this was 10 minutes. So now the guy wants me to bill him and I really don't feel like I did anything that warrants payment. My question is this, what would you charge for 10 minutes of extremely simple changes? I don't even know where to begin on this.

This is just me, other people might be different. I do this sort of work all the time and charge everything by my hourly billing rate. If it took 10 minutes then on my invoice in the quantity field I would put 0.15 and for the price my hourly rate. So for me:

0.15 hours x $150 per hour = $22.50

That is what I would have charged for something that took me about 10 minutes of my time. The way I got 0.15 was by taking my minutes and dividing it by 60. So in this case:

(10 minutes / 60 minutes per hour) = 0.166666 hours

I then rounded down to 0.15 hours in this case as I usually keep things in multiples of 5 down to the hundredths precision. So 0.16666 is closer to 0.15 than it is to 0.20.

I find this works the best because once you figure out how much your time is worth, then any job you do you can always calculate out what to charge. That is much easier then guessing how much it might be "worth" based on the difficulty of work you did. Hope that helps

hot damn $150 an hour... well i see your point grinch2171 on seeing that you dont think you did anything that was worth the time and i have had people that said the same thing that they want to pay me and i am like okay how about $20.


im just messing with you BigWebMaster.... we all got to make a living somehow.. i wish i made that at my job.. lol

While it may only have taken you ten minutes or so, you must remember that you spent time learning how to do the work, whether as a work skill or just for fun, and the payment is for your knowledge and the time and effort you put into gaining it, as well as for the time spent doing the job for them.
You saved them time having to research and learn how to do it for themselves and the changes you made were of value to them. Your knowledge has a value as well as your time.

If you do it for free, you also set a precedent. It makes it awkward if they want more work done in future and you haven't charged the first time. They could have many 10 minute jobs for you in future and you will become resentful if you always do it free.
The future jobs may take longer, so how would you decide the amount of time that is long enough to bill them for? You should bill them for even the shortest work, even if the fee is small, therefore you should charge for this ten minutes.
They will not grudge it, you have earned it and they know they can come back to you but won't expect to always get small jobs done free.
Some people will charge for no less than 30 minute slots, regardless of only taking ten minutes, so being charged for ten minutes is very reasonable.

You know first of all, it can seems you as very easy task and that takes 10 min, but really one change at website can take a few hours. I always get such letter from my clients where they say that I need 5 or 10 min for different tasks and really It takes one hour or even more. And also you pay for knowledge of this programmer.

You need to charge for the service your provide. Otherwise you will feel bad about yourself. And they would feel bad for taking something for nothing.

IT services are generally very high paid.

So write them a bill!

You pay 5$ for the service and 200$ for the know-how.

And don't forget that it wasn't just 5-10 minutes editing files.

How long did you spend talking about it at the start with your sister, getting the actual details of the changes that needed doing (via conversation, telephone, email or whatever the medium), you must have had to wait to get logged into their system/server, ftp the file back up to the server, etc.

5 minutes coding in a file is NOT all the time you spent on this (well, I don't think so, perhaps you did walk into the office and they said, "hey, we've got these files open, can you make these changes right here right now..."

I strongly recommend this book to everyone on this forum. It goes over pretty much everything having to do with how to price your work and the different ways of doing so. My instructor assigned it as the textbook for one of my courses and it's the first textbook I have enjoyed reading:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/144030243X/ref=oh_o02_s00_i01_details

P.S. It's also a REALLY affordable book. Especially considering I spend between 100 - 300 per textbook (school texts are such ripoffs.)

I ended up charging them 100 bucks and they paid it with no qualms. I said my rate was 100 per hour with an hour minimum.

What you charged sounds about right. We hire out to a bunch of people on a contract basis and we always go by their hourly rate and a 1 hour minimum doesn't seem too far-fetched either.

I agree with cerio,
What you have to remember is, Hes not paying you for 10 minutes worth of work. He is paying for your expertise, how long you spent studying the matter, any software packages you used, AND THEN your time.

I think 100 is perfectly reasonable. (I think that's about 63GBP)

For small web designs jobs I try to get a list of their tasks and then base my quote on how many hours I work. Otherwise I present them with a flat rate.

As mentioned, you don't charge just that 10 minutes, but knowledge, too. So, $20, $50, $100, all that can be appropriate. Depends on personal relationship with your sister's boss.

Agree with everything you said except that. "Buddy prices" only get you a crap ton of more work under the same price in the future. Not only the client, but anyone they recommend to you as they will inevitably say to their friends "I can get you a good deal with a buddy of mine, he only charges $x an hour".