How to charge for websites?

I&#x27;ve seen and used just about every approach to this, yet the author completely skips the most lucrative approach, the subscription based model.<p>I&#x27;ve used this on larger clients and have had great success with it. It gives them a sense of comfort since they&#x27;re paying me monthly to keep their content fresh and SEO up-to-date and still have the opportunity for a redesign after a year. Plus, it gives me a nice chunk or recurring monthly revenue and establishes a long-term relationship.

I&#x27;m not sure how seriously I should take this advice when the authors website looks like this:<p><a href="http://www.optimalworks.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.optimalworks.net&#x2F;</a>

I like to charge a flat rate for the first X number of hours, then charge $Y&#x2F;hour after that. This forces me to gather the requirement before making an estimate. It discourages the customer from adding new requirement unless it is worth $Y&#x2F;hour to them.

Here&#x27;s a question: why does the model website-as-a-service works for blogs, but not for other kinds of websites?<p>You see, wordpress.com charges for blogs, ghost.io charges for blogs, other people give blogs for free, but still benefit from it somehow, also there&#x27;s the example of portfolio WaaS like 4ormat.com, but this model only applies to these cases, never to hospital sites, restaurant sites, hotel sites, book sites, or any other kind of website.<p>Then people in need of these other kinds of website always fell into building a blog, even paying for other people to build them a self-hosted pretty awful solution Wordpress blog. has this been tried?

My small experience with charging is related specifically to the client size.<p>If you want to charge $350&#x2F;hour, weekly and on a long basis, odds are you&#x27;ll be charging a corporation and not a household.<p>My experience also, you probably won&#x27;t get $350&#x2F;hour even if you charge the client so. There will be middle man, taxes, vat, payment delays, accounting and many other expenses...<p>That&#x27;s why you should be charging at least $200&#x2F;hour. And that&#x27;s for the very mundane, and noncompetitive tasks.

This is sensible, but can&#x27;t he find someone to compare us computer folks to besides used car dealers? That&#x27;s not painting a happy picture in many people&#x27;s minds.

Why does this site eat 50% of my CPU?