However, high-end means the focus gets drastically shifted from programming to figuring out what the client wants.

That said, you can charge 250-500 as a freelancer for a few hours of consultation. Your rates should largely depend on:

1) How many hours the client intends on spending with you 2) Urgency of work (and thus how much bandwidth you need to give to it) 3) Client's ROI

If you save your client 1000 hrs of reporting work a year by developing them a custom solution, that is easily worth well over 100,000k for that client: even if they are only paying people $50/hr to create these reports.

You can't charge 100,000k, otherwise the client will not have a great ROI. However, such a solution should take you somewhere around 100-400 hours to complete.

That works out to $125/hr in the worst-case, giving the client a good ROI after the first six months, and should give you a solid 4-6 months of work. If they need it sooner you need to charge them more, because you'll spend less time on business development.

This is a perfect world hypothetical of course ... in reality many other things come into play that will only work to drive your rates down.