How Much?
 

I've just spent 3 hours plus working on a custom script for a customer. It's going to take another 6 hours or so to get up and running properly, do you think £60 is a fair price for said work? :-/

Most assuredly NOT. The lowest rung, junior developers make 20 the hour. I would never spend more than 2-3 hours on 100USD ( give or take a dollar or two )

Under no circumstances, unless you already have a contract that is.

Absolutely not, at the very least double it and then add some more. Minimum wage would be £51.57 for those 9 hours! For a single days work, in isolation (not part of a longer contract or wage), £150+ is fine for a freelance PHP developer just starting out.

my tip: don't lower the price, to be nice or so on, if you know your work and, do it good, damn dude you shall get paid good as well ;)

-CF

I think you have your answers, so I don't wish to repeat. However, was it case that you under-estimated the time the script was going to take? That is a common problem, but you'll learn to estimate the times to program scripts better as you become more acquainted with freelancing.

What I tended to do when freelancing was break all the items down into a list. Something like so:

• Login -- 30 minutes;
• Register -- 1 hour;
• Profile -- 2 hours;

It will help you visualise the project, and therefore the duration you should expect it to take.

I've found this quite useful in the past, for time tracking:
http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm

that and http://pim.kde.org/components/karm.php

Thanks for your advice everyone :-)

Also note, if something took say 6 hours because you were learning as you went along, obviously one cant charge the client for this. If this is the case, what I used to do is look back and see how long it would take me to do it now, now that I know how and charge accordingly.

A balance must be found, if one charges too low, to increase the chances of repeat business, next time round the client expects the same low rate.