[thefultonhow]

I charge $30 per hour. That's a real bargain because I worked with an outfit for a little while that charged $85 per hour. One of the advantages of charging less is that you can charge for the actual time you took to fix the problem. If you're charging $85/hr and you took five hours to do an offsite job, you can't charge $85*5 or people will have a heart attack. On the other hand, $30*5 is a little bit more reasonable, and if you lowball it and only charge for four hours, that's $120, which most people will pay in a second to have a working computer again.

Although I'm not doing it right now, from January to July I ran a tidy little freelance business. Most of the time I only charged $20 per hour, but even so, with only word-of-mouth advertising, I made over $5000. Many customers kept on calling me back to do more stuff; some customers paid me almost $400 over several visits, and I had one small-business client that paid me $1200.

Computer rebuilds I did off-site, and I usually charged for three to four hours. Onsite work I charged for actual time spent, and when the perosn was far enough away, I added a ~half-hour transportation fee.

Near the end of my freelancing period, I had business cards printed up. I will use them when I go back to Baltimore; business cards are a good tool for word-of-mouth advertising, because you can give them to clients and the clients can then hand them out to friends who are having problems.

There is a tremendous market for computer-repair services, especially when the technician is competent. People relize that in this day and age having a computer does not just entail an upfront purchase, but rather investment and maintenence. People are used to paying upwards of a thousand dollars for a computer; if they have to pay a couple hundred to have it working properly after a year, they don't sweat it that much.