Ask HN: How many freelance programmers are there?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10069768

by ahfarmer • 11 years ago

11 19 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Writing software that could help freelance programmers who bill hourly. Wondering if there are enough of us out there to justify my effort on the tool. Curious about the US and worldwide.

a3n2• 11 years ago

As many as there are pingpong balls in the schoolbus.

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

haha. So 2.4 million? ; ) https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/23jtom/how_...

Part of the reason I asked is that I work freelance, but all the other programmers that I know are full-time employees. So in my small world it seems like there are not that many of us.

a3n2• 11 years ago

I'm not particularly good at chasing business (I tried in a different field for awhile). I like someone else to keep the lights on and find something for me to do. Probably why a lot of other people don't freelance.

eds2015• 11 years ago

What does your software do?

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

Thanks for asking!

It creates a timesheet based on your git history, and then creates an invoice from that. It guesses the number of hours you've worked an any given day, and also shows you your work for that day and allows you to correct the estimate.

It used to take me an hour to create an invoice - now it takes about a minute.

It's not a huge savings - but for those like me who dread creating invoices it makes me happy to get it done quicker.

Of course the tool is worthless unless you are a programmer checking all of your work into git. I'm trying to find out if this thing could be useful to people other than me.

zhte415• 11 years ago

Guessing the number of hours could be difficult, as different people have different workflow.

I don't freelance, but I do bill hourly for consultancy work. I just calculate the number of hours in my calendar I've assigned, and work from that. It takes minutes per month (and I know what I'm doing based on the calendar).

In some cases lawyers bill by the minute. I'm not sure they use a specialized tool, and imagine it's more like an Excel sheet with time of call.

Sounds like an interesting technology, but limited not just to freelancers who use Git, but freelancers who use Git and have a similar workflow you use (and those that have a different workflow could raise hell regarding it not working for them, especially as it's about how much they request to get paid).

I also doubt many billed clients would like to hear their billable time was guessed or estimated.

danielvf2• 11 years ago

I've been freelancing for 15 years now. Sending invoices is by far my least favorite work activity.

I have my own rails app that handles time tracking, and invoices. (Some customers just log into the app, and pay their bills without my involvement.) I spend about two hours a month on invoices.

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

Me too - I hate sending invoices. Is your time tracking tool of the clock in / clock out variety?

Also I'm curious - how do you collect payment? I usually only have one client at a time paying large sums so I ask for a check in the mail. All the online forms of collecting payment seem to take too much of a percentage.

danielvf2• 11 years ago

Yes, it's clock in, clock out. I do checks in the mail for 90% of work, billed monthly, and Stripe and PayPal for smaller projects.

Firegarden• 11 years ago

Freelancing for 15 years as well. 1999 was a great year! Sending invoices is my favorite activity. "America is not a country, it's just a business. Now fuckin pay me."

danieltillett• 11 years ago

I hope that is not printed on your invoices :)

brudgers• 11 years ago

It's hard to see the value proposition of a bespoke freelance programmer hourly billing application versus a general purpose book-keeping application familiar to accountants, backed by regular support, and having been debugged over many years of field deployment.

What makes your solution better than Quickbooks or GnuCash?

What percentage of the market for free-lancer programmers can a bespoke product capture?

Why go through all the development effort of a book-keeping program and then only target it at a very limited market?

Good luck.

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

This tool is more of a timesheet creator than an invoice creator or billing app. It uses your git history to create a timesheet (with guidance from the user to make sure all the hours are correct).

One possibility is you could use my tool to create a timesheet and then import that into Quickbooks. But the tool will also create a PDF invoice for you.

The tool has addressed a pain point for myself personally, but you're right - it may be too niche to be worth putting out there. My market is 'programmers who bill hourly and use git'. Maybe not that many people, and lots of those people might be happy with how they track time already.

pranavpiyush• 11 years ago

One way of answering this question is to look at total number of service providers on odesk, elance, fiverr, etc...

This article has some stats - http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-free...

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

Thanks! This is a great article for what I'm trying to figure out.

One thing I see in a lot of these articles is general reference to the term 'freelancer'. This seems to lump programmers in with writers, designers, accountants, and anyone else who can work on a contract basis.

I wonder how many of the 1 million freelancer jobs posted on elance in 2012 were programmer jobs specifically?

jefflinwood• 11 years ago

I think that if you look at elance/odesk/upwork, you can actually rule out all of those developers because they get paid through the upwork platform - they wouldn't be sending invoices based on their git history. They might have other clients that they invoice directly, but I wouldn't count on it.

ahfarmer7• 11 years ago

Good point. I think a lot of these sites do per-project pricing only.

1arity• 11 years ago

I did a market sizing on "programmers" ( not just freelance ) about a year ago, and came up with around 20 million worldwide. If you take the statistic that 40% ( by 2020, or 35% today ) of US workforce is freelance and apply that it would be around 8 million freelance programmers worldwide.

Perhaps a really cool way of doing this sizing would to use "authorship attribution" techniques over webpage javascript to see how many "authors" there were -- tho that could likely be way off as well. Seems like a ridiculously involved way of calculating it tho.

Ask HN: How many freelance programmers are there?

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