How much should I charge to maintain a website for a small used car dealership?

[raspberrypi]

Basicly I have no idea how much to charge for this job. This is what it will entail:
1. Maintain a web site. I don't host the web site I usually contract a guy that will do the hosting and technical stuff. This isnt much money less then $100USD a month that I pay out of pocket. What I do is upload the pictures of the cars into the GUI interface and create little web pages with the cars info.
2. Go to the location and take quality pictures of the cars.
3. Run the car fax and post it to the site. I use vehicle check which lets you do unlimited reports for 40 bucks a month.
4. Make sure their google page has accurate info on it (SEO shit), some companies charge an outrageous price for this and just do a shit job, like loading up key words or doing other things that google doesn't care about or has gotten wise to
5. Answer customer emails. I can sell the cars, I'm actually really good at it but I hate customers so I dont want to get to involved with that.
6. Maybe list on craigs list if thats not just swamped out by fake ads.

Basically this will require me to check the site daily, but not a whole lot of time.

Do any of you guys do this for a living (not just used cars) but help businesses with their web presence or advertisement. I dont want to rip the guy off, but I want to be competitive. I was thinking either a fixed price per month, fixed price plus cost per car, fixed price plus cost per car when it sells. Hes in a shitty retail location so this dealership needs to be a destination place you go to after seeing the car on the internet.

[jpanhalt]

Charge at least 50% more than your are worth.

Actually the ratio in most businesses is 100% more than you are worth, but I had a feeling you were trying to get by on the cheap side.  Any successful independent contractor will tell you that ancillary expenses at least equal what he pays himself.

John

[Fsck]

25$ USD got me a beast with 750GB*4 in RAID 10 and 2*2TB in RAID1 with a crappy Opteron 1381 and 8GB of ram, but it's a 1Gbit connection with 10TB transfer from North Carolina.
Value is really quite relative.

I'd say bill by the hour, depending on how much you like the guy. If it's a good friend, I probably wouldn't charge a lot. Stranger? = market price. I probably wouldn't do it for less than 60$/hour with a minimum duration per month, if I enjoyed doing that kind of thing as a hobby. If it was a job, I'd probably want a fixed contract stipulating a base fee for a specific allowance of time/work and then have an hourly charge for resolving anything in excess of that.

You could probably find yourself a student who'd happily do the grunt work for 20$/hour though.

[rstofer]

First of all, I don't get out of bed for less than $100/hr.  As a consequence, I don't do any consulting because I'm too old to be worth that kind of money.  But there was a time, many years ago...

You have to realize that you are trading away the only thing of REAL value, time from your life, in exchange for something as boring as money.  You only have so much life, charge accordingly.

I would charge by the hour for everything I did.  You can negotiate an hourly rate (keep it high, you're trading away your life) and then bill for everything.

Another problem:  Are you going to get 1099s (IRS form reporting this income) at the end of the year?  If so, some percentage of what you earned is going to the .gov.  Back when I was consulting, more than 50% of my income went to taxes (State and Federal).  So, here I am, working every waking minute with the .gov taking half and they didn't even send someone to help!  Even at $100/hr, I'm only really making $50/hr after taxes and that really isn't worth getting up.

Your client will probably want to file 1099s so that they can deduct from their income the amount they sent you.  Otherwise, they have to pay you and pay the taxes on what they paid you.  Better to send the 1099 and recover the taxes.

It's business, treat it that way!

[aargee]

A nice classic muscle car?

[bitseeker]

@raspberrypi: It's a tough question to answer because rates vary greatly by location, level of experience, type of customer, which side of the bed you got up on, etc. The best thing to do is find out how much businesses in your local area charge for similar work, or even just for general web site building/maintenance.

[Rick Law]

Go with "volume plan" and let your customer decide...

Example: For the first 12 month:
First 10 hours $120.00/hour
Second 10 hours $100.00/hour
Third 10 hours $80.00
Beyond 30 hours, $70.00/hour
All material are billed as incurred.
After 12 month (or no billable work hours from him after 3 months), clock starts over and he is back to "first 10 hours" rate of 120/hr to work back down.

Plug in whatever numbers for that type of an approach.  The graduated reduction will make your customer more likely to spend the next dollar for the finishing touch.

[Kjelt]

You should know for yourself how many $/hour you would like to do this work and charge accordingly with some extra risk for incidents (work in weekends, holidays) of 25%-50% up.

Now just a tip from a case that happened to a friend of mine: make sure the bills are paid in time or stop soon with the updates.
This friend was not paid for four months (promises promises) by a company but he had a large ace in his sleeve, he also did the hosting and owned the domain name.
So he took the website offline with a message: this website is temporary out of order since the bills are not paid.   
It took three months and a nasty lawsuit but he got his money, also sold the domain name to the company wiht a nice profit and was glad he got rid of them in the end.