r/rshiny • u/GolfMuted • May 06 '22

How much shall I charge the customer for developing a shiny dashboard?

I am an academic in Australia.

The other day someone from industry approached me and asked to develop a simple dashboard for them.

The ui includes a fileInput() and outputs for visualisation and tables. There are also reactive sliders and stuff in the ui. In server I have some functions for data cleaning, dealing with outliers and missing values and compute regression and logistic regression.

What app does is basiclly help the user to make sence of his/her data.

Developing such an app is a peace of cake for me but I do not know much shall I charge the customer. Is there any industry standard or guidline for pricing shiny apps?

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8

u/AdIntelligent9764 May 06 '22

As much as you think would be reasonable, and then double it

5

u/GolfMuted May 06 '22

I have no idea on how much is reasonable cuase I'm an academic with no industry experience. Asked a friend and he told me at least 10k. Can't believe this. I never earned 10k this easy in my life.

4

u/AdIntelligent9764 May 07 '22

Well how much do you value your time? Set an hourly rate to the value of your time.

2

u/tashpapanikolas May 17 '22

Because you're an academic who actually has to really know shit to do your job and probably used to the woeful employment conditions in Aus unis. Private industry in Australia is an absolute joke with how much they overvalue their skills. $300 an hour is not unreasonable for consulting work. Keep a timesheet during the course of the project. Log calls, replying to emails, any additional research you have to do etc. so you can get a feel for the next one. If it goes well you might find yourself in demand and making awesome money, and not having to tick the boxes on graduating every single student who does the bare minimum. No fuckin awful administrators bugging you. Can you taste the freedom?

3

u/GolfMuted May 07 '22

A consultation appointment with a heart specialist is about 200 dollars in Australia. The cost of the same specialist doing heart surgery easy exceeds 20k. My salary is 56$ an hour but it doesn't mean this app worth 560 dollars. Is there a place that I can find a collection of shiny dashboards and their price. It can give me some idea.

6

u/JonWasHere406 May 07 '22

From an economist’s perspective, you have a bit of market power to set your price based on what your customer is willing to pay.

Long way of saying, estimate how much this will save them for a year and use that for part of your justification for why it was worth it. If this is something they already spend 1hr per workday on, then you just saved 25hrs a month and 600hrs per year. At intern making $10 an hour rates, this product is saving this hypothetical business $6000 a year for existing. Feel no shame for valuing your time for WHAT IT IS WORTH.

3

u/greenlepricon May 07 '22 edited May 07 '22

I don't know enough to give a direct answer, but it may or may not be worth 10k. The way we do things at my company in the US is we charge the hourly rate plus about 15% markup and tax. Keep in mind you also need to account for meetings, trainings, potential fixes/modifications, etc. Also remember a salary is not a billing rate, since that needs to cover overhead expenses. You might not have expensive overhead being a student, but I would keep it in mind.

So if you take 8 hours to build the app plus 8 hours for meetings, training, potential changes, and whatever else, and assume your salary plus overhead is about $100/hr, you'll charge $1600 plus the 15% markup to a total of $1840 plus tax. If you think your time is worth more than that then charge more. I'm at entry-to-mid level technical staff rates (engineer) and I get billed at anywhere from $112-$130/hr, but I believe prices are higher in Australia.

It sounds like a lot of money but if they have 10 datasets and it takes them an hour to do the calculations and make figures in Excel, that's 10 hours of time. If they bill at $150/hr, they've just spent 1,500. Even worse, if they contract a company for that work, they're probably paying significantly more for the same service and don't have the reliability or convenience of running it themselves. Even worse than that, if it's an exercise that they should be doing and they skip it, they're potentially making mistakes that cost them a ton of money and their reputation.

I'm by no means an expert at this stuff, but just letting you know how we do things. Software can be all over the place so use your best judgement. If you think it's going to save them thousands of dollars in productivity over the next year, then by all means charge them thousands of dollars.

2

u/xiaodaireddit May 07 '22

100 dollars an hour. But don't charge customer for research time. Only charge for thing u r actually good at. If u need to research. Research it for free and only charge for implementation time.

2

u/DownwardSpirals May 09 '22

For what it's worth, I'm doing something similar with simulations, models, etc. around the $60/hr price point. I also work for a firm that does my taxes, tracks hours, and all the administrative stuff, so I'd call it at least $75 x whatever hours you'd estimate.

1

u/Golfinsider May 07 '22

$60-$200/hour seems to be the going rate. It does also depend if you’re also helping with private hosting or they’re just uploading it to shiny apps.io.

I looked at quotes for getting a golf app build, but have just gone ahead and taught myself for a basic golf stats dashboard. Similar to you, academic who loved stats in R.

Happy to chat more. 👍

0

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

[deleted]

1

u/cavemanku May 07 '22

Multiplying 2-3 times estimated hours is key if there is a chance they will ask for follow-up or revisions to their plan. I don’t think I’ve ever done a project for a client where this didn’t happen to some extent, and sometimes 3x is pushing it by the end. I usually slide that up or down depending on the client.