Giving cost estimates on custom Magento development

Its been over a year now of extensive Magento development for me. My job description changed from being Developer to Senior Developer and now to Project Manager / Senior Developer. In short, amount of work I do increased.

One of the most annoying part of work for me is the estimates part. How do you know if you are good in giving cost estimate? Is it when you get the client say “Yes” at any cost, or is it when you get client say “Yes” on mutual satisfaction?

Practical example: How much would you estimate the task of adding a simple menu of just tree or four items in footer, that can be controlled trough CMS static block?

Task above is easy, experienced Magento developer can do it in cca 10-20min at most, its easy as copy-pasting the code snippet. However, this is merely time needed for doing the actual work. What about time needed to setup the FTP, find and modify the files, login to Magento and create CMS static block, post a reply on the resolved task… When you calculate all this in estimate, you soon come to total of hour or even two for a task this easy.

When you work on giving estimates and bill “by a minute”, you are soon to be facing a strange issue. Lets say a realistic scenario for the above example would be cca 1-2 hours, if you are to offer a quality implementation of clients request that would not break on next page. If you multiply that with your hourly fee, lets say $60/hour, you get estimate of $60-$120 for this simple task. And thats not even including the cost of giving the estimate (which can be time consuming on larger inquiries).

Let me tell you, client wont be happy and you will most likely look like a money thirsty blood sucker to him. To him, all he want is a link or two in footer. He does not see the difference of hard coding the links in code and implementing them trough some static block. To you as a experienced Magento developer, hard coding this kind of stuff is surely out of option. But this is reality, I dare you to say otherwise.

Keep in mind that when doing a “full” project development, tasks like these are resolved much faster. Given that they are part of a development “workflow”, they are resolved as you go. My point is, that when you are being hired to work on a partial/specific task only, you are most likely to loose big time with reasonable cost estimates.

What most of our clients do not understand is that Magento is not WordPress (no disrespect). If you want to code properly, and with upgrade-ability in mind, then everything in Magento becomes so time consuming.