I charge 115 € per hour ex VAT (or roughly 900 € per day of 8 hours). I do mostly remote work (ruby, rails, etl, agile project management, sysadmin, devops, css/js, technical/org coaching).
If a client can give me visibility and ensure eg: 10 days per month for some months in a row, then I provide a discount on that rate.
I never do fixed-price projects and instead, provide best-effort estimates and bill by the hour.
One way to put it is (and how I explained it to a client once): if you do fixed price and estimate 100, but end up having 120 of work, then you'd need to quote 140 (40 padding) to the next project estimated at 100, just to make up for your previous loss. In the end the uncertainty costs everyone.
For people willing to find how to do better estimate, I can warmly recommend following Mike Cohn training:
I do something similar, in the middle of a fixed price and a best guess estimate (I can go back for an increase of hours).
The key to either is being accurate at estimating, which in turn means being able to find the number and size of potential unknowns/gotchas in an estimate.
Get good at that and it's a lot easier, especially on projects you have built from scratch, which lend themselves a lot better to fixed-price quotes.
funny, its almost exactly what we do. we price 110€/h remote, 140€/hour onsite and we only do time and material.
After working in this space for many years this is still a problem to 'sell' to many customers in our space (entrepreneurs (especially 1st time) and startups building web applications). Many people still think in terms of "how much this project will cost with this exact but not-really specified feature-set and deadlines".
There is this expectation for a consultant to assume the business and development risks.
Recently I think I found the explanation that seems to 'click'. When a client comes to us their primary problem is not having sufficient in-house r&d capacity and thats the exact problem that we can solve.
If they had the in-house r&d capable of delivering the project most wouldn't be looking for any outside help.
But with the in-house team no business risks would go away, scope and budget would still have to be tightly managed.
The fact that instead of the internal r&d team an outside company is handling the development will not somehow magically remove the risks from the picture.
and the fact that client would happily use in-house team means that removing those risks was never the real need.
If a client can give me visibility and ensure eg: 10 days per month for some months in a row, then I provide a discount on that rate.
I never do fixed-price projects and instead, provide best-effort estimates and bill by the hour.