BTBurke

I recently landed my first freelance job based off a little side project that I had on Github. I'm not a professional developer, I just do this as a hobby in my free time. It's serendipitous that I have a few months off between jobs and I'd like to make sure I don't make a rookie mistake in pricing this job and setting up the contract.

The work is machine learning algorithm development and then integrating the solution into the client's existing infrastructure.

A few questions:

* What are the pros/cons of an hourly rate vs. fixed price?

* Anything to watch out for in how the contract is structured? e.g., provisions about intellectual property, dealing with changes in requirements, or spelling out what deliverables are required?

* What kind of padding factor do you apply to your estimates of hours to complete a feature?

Based on some other things that I've read, I'm leaning towards pitching an hourly rate with an upper limit. For example, quoting a high-end price of $X and charging by the hour, giving them the savings if I can implement it in fewer hours or (hopefully not) having to renegotiate if it's significantly more complicated than I envision.

Any advice would be appreciated. If someone has a boilerplate contract that has worked well for them in the past, I'd love to see it. Thanks HN!