Hey folks, I've been approached to do paid OSS work by a large SaaS startup (around 200Mn$ in funding). I'm not sure what to charge them. Has anyone here done something similar? Could we chat once?

It depends on your past projects, skills level, year of experience.

@thankful-solstice-95381 Is there a range for people with YoE of 2 years? (Still in college, Have been working as an engineer at a small Indian fintech startup full-time for the last 2 years.) I used to contribute a lot of code to their OSS repos in my free time.

If they know that you do quality work then you should go for 30 dollar an hour, minimum should be 25 dollar. Many indian tech consultancies charge around 50 to 120 dollars an hour

Will keep this in mind. Thank you.

@dazzling-author-99268 If possible, pickup a small project with a reasonable fee (1 week kinda work).. If they're at $200m funding scale, they'll most likely have a pricing scale setup already. ($25-30/hour should also be good enough to start with) If you enjoy working on the OSS and like the team engagement, think about negotiating for a longer duration. Why do I say so? 1. Sometimes billing/approvals become tricky/too admin heavy and it kills the vibe of the work. 2. Good to get a sense that the team will treat you like a contractual freelancer or community contributor. 3. Sometimes OSS have such good learnings+networking that lower pay can compensate. 🥲 Let us know how it goes 😁

Yeah. That's what I was thinking. I like the team and I've worked with some of their members on OSS for a lot of time. I just didn't want to quote a rate which would make it seem like cheap Indian engineer for hire and get shafted later on (for an FT role).

Hey, I would recommend to read https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/. It not a direct answer to your question, but worth a read and related to this topic.

Hey @dazzling-author-99268 I've worked with open-source cos as a full-time employee. Lmk if you wanna discuss what rate to set

@wooden-raincoat-49327 DM'ed you. Thanks for helping out.