Going Solo, Successfully
&gt; Don&#x27;t charge by the hour<p>This is bad advice.<p>Charging for a full week will make you lose a lot of clients. In the case of software development: The client never knows the full spec of the project and you&#x27;ll have weeks were 10 hours is enough. Charging for those extra 30 hours is terrible deal for your client and he won&#x27;t take it.<p>What you should be careful about is how much you charge per hour. You may set different rates based on context like: for a full time project project you charge X, for future maintaining (which is on demand ) you charge 1.5 times X.<p>Hourly also protects you agains scope creeping. 
Charging by the week&#x2F;project&#x2F;milestones requires a near full specification and it&#x27;s done at an agency level where you&#x27;ve a team. I&#x27;ve been working hourly and I love it. You can try to spec out any project as much as you can, in the end you can&#x27;t predict scope changes and&#x2F;or unexpected problems: API is broken, missed an important email, build system is failing for no obvious reason, server went down, etc, etc.<p>You have to figure out when charging by the hour&#x2F;week&#x2F;month&#x2F;milestones is reasonable. Just because someone is making 120K a year in San Fran, doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ve to make the same amount while freelancing. It heavily swings from client to client.