yutyut

A client reached out to me after seeing my online portfolio and wants me to build him a backend for a product he's developing for his personal business. I'm less concerned with the technical requirements (I know I can handle those!) but am fairly clueless when it comes to pricing, a contract etc. I have an initial meeting coming up and want to appear as informed and professional as possible.

1. How do you decide how much to charge once you've determined all of the requirements for a given project? I'm staying away from hourly billing.

2. Does anyone have a good contract template they can provide for project-based billing? Is this worth pursuing on LegalZoom? Is there a boilerplate solution already floating around out there that you would recommend?

3. Is a ballpark price during the initial meeting something to stay away from? I don't want to pull a number out of thin air based on an on-the-fly assessment.

I'm currently a military pilot and have under two years until my contract is up. My background was four years as an SDE and QE; data science and mobile. I still keep up with coding and recently put out a paid app on the app store that was top 15 for several weeks in Productivity and continues to get steady downloads-the back end is Node on Firebase. I consider myself a versatile developer and have a history with a lot of different stacks.

FAANG is my initial goal (I was at one before) but I have a TS/SCI clearance which could open some doors if I choose to go that route (leaning towards not going that route). Utilizing the GI Bill is also an option, though I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze for a master's or MBA.

What can I do to prepare to re-enter the tech industry?