[ushercakes]

I run CRFYI, a site that basically operates like levels.fyi or glassdoor but tailored specifically to freelance/consulting rates.

I'd encourage you to check out some of the submissions on the site to see what people are doing when they earn x amount of money per hour. Don't want to spam the link everywhere but it's in my profile.

Like any service, price is a filter, on both sides. If you're hiring a consultant and they're way cheaper than everybody else, red flags start to go off. Why are they so cheap? Same on the other side - if the consultant is very expensive, you wonder why, and generally conclude that they must be high caliber at what they do. If you have the budget for it, you'll almost always prefer the person that seems to provide the "premium" service.

A funny part of it though, to appear as a "premium" consultant, you don't really need to do anything differently than a regular consultant. You just need to have way higher rates, clients make the assumption from there.

[tomjakubowski]

You run a site which is patently relevant to the discussion. Save your comment readers a click! https://contractrates.fyi

[mr_o47]

This is great Thank you for making this

[derekja]

Nice site. I question the design decision to require a visitor to "add a new rate" to see existing pay though. It seems to incentivize making stuff up and brings the reliability of your data into question.

[ushercakes]

Thanks! It's definitely a valid point. We do get a lot of made up, totally BS data from people doing exactly what you're suggesting. It's usually obvious though and we filter it out. Nothing gets added to the primary DB without us looking at it first. If it looks anomalous, we'll deny it. You don't have to add a rate though, you can still view 99% of the data without doing that.

Things we show to everyone, regardless if they added a rate or not: - Title, location, hourly rate, skills, industry, org size. - Role based search

Things that are locked only to people that made submissions: - Additional notes by submitters, which only about 10% of submissions have - Charts, which are really just formatted versions of the already available data - Location, skill based search - Project based rates (we will eventually unlock this similar to hourly rates, but for now, we don't have enough data and are really in collection mode)

We are actively working on a feature for verified rates though, where we validate that the submitter actually earned the rate they claimed by requiring additional information.

As a side bit, I encourage people - if you don't have a rate to submit, just submit a rate with total default values and leave a comment saying "dummy rate". We will filter it out and you'll still get access to everything.