Pricing

I'm pretty new to the Philippines as well. But from the several hours of research that I've put into this I would say a rough way to figure it would be with this sentence:

"How many hours would it take for a skilled developer to create this website?"

Then you can multiply that by the hourly rate that you charge here in the Philippines.

When I accept work here (and the corporate types have told me that I am quite low) I only charge P500 per hour. Please understand that this is not the number I would give for an International company with funds coming in from 1st world countries.

You'll get different reactions to that rate depending on whether you are catering to a small business, an NGO, or a large corporation. I primarily like to work with NGOs because I'm looking for much more than just earning a paycheck in life. I haven't even entertained a for profit corporation and don't have any plans doing so in the next year or two.

And all of this of course depends on whether you are doing Drupal (which I am assuming you are referring to) and whether you are just plugging in things or actually tweaking or writing code.

And of course you don't know how long it will take to do a site until you've done it :-) This is where creating a few sites for free comes in. You should always do that to get experience first. Create a couple of sites for friends and family, create a couple of sites for some organizations with a good mission to improve things you think are admirable, create a couple of free (or really low cost) sites for a couple of schools near you.

This is also how you start your portfolio. All of this of course assumes you are starting from ground level. Much of this will be irrelevant if you are a seasoned coder with a portfolio and simply moving from a 1st world country to a third world country.

There are many sizes & shapes of projects that clients ask from us developers.

I think the answers you'll get from different people will most likely vary and might just end up confusing you in the long run. I guess what I'm saying is that... it really depends on the kind/class/category of project. In the Drupalsphere (aka "Drupal Planet") you get different specialties:

theming, design, project-management site-building, site-maintenance, module-dev / coding, site-upgrading, training, hosting, performance-tuning, e-commerce -- fetch the scroll since there's tons of job descriptions out there.

My personal bottom-line is: rates depend on the type of project, the capability of the client to demand/pay and a whole lotta good judgement

At the end of the day, it's really all about the work-relationship between you and your client(s). Just like marriage. :P

One more thing I wanted to add that crossed my mind. A business professor once told me that "If you aren't losing 10% of your potential clients due to your price then you are charging too little".

I've started out at P500 because of the clientele that I've chosen and the kind of simple sites that I'm doing as I increase my skills. When I was in the U.S. I was more of a hardware, operating system and network setup guy. My skills were much more seasoned in that area and I could charge $30US for nonprofits and $60US for small to mid size businesses.

Also keep in mind the independent work that I did in the U.S. was primarily between 1998 and 2004; so it's been a while :-)

This thread has also been helpful for me as well. I feel a little more comfortable with a "game plan" of charging higher rates in the future.