If your project cannot be defined in detail then the hourly reae project is best. For example:

• If you just  want a website built but I don’t have the content or design ready yet.
• You want to sell products but don’t know how many yet.
• You need to make changes as the project goes along.
• The project is long term.
• You want to see some designs before the project is begun.
• We don’t know what is causing errors on the website.
• The website needs to load faster

Then an hourly rate project is the way to go.

Here are some reasons why an hourly rate project might be better.

1. COST CONROL

With an hourly rate project you can limit the total hours worked per week. Moreover, with Upwork you get to see a Work Diary which gives a description of what I am working on every 30 minutes with a screenshot. At any time you can pause the contract if you feel that I am not doing it right or that the progress is too slow.

2. BETTER PROJECT

With a fixed-price model, you build specification in the beginning, which means you are effectively making serious decisions when you have the least amount of information. You can’t change (or it gets difficult/expensive to change) when start to see the project come to life. The web developer always looks at a task and figures out how much time it will take to do then adds a percentage for unforeseen problems before giving a fixed price. So Fixed price projects tend to cost more.

3. RISK

It sounds like a fixed-price model should lower your risks – shouldn’t it? Not really. There are some reasons why it might not:

1. Estimates are hard to make especially for vague task descriptions and long-term projects.
2. Once a milestone is defined you are committed to it. And it is almos impossible to make changes.
3. It’s harder to track progress, and you are only able to assess the deliverables on milestone handovers.
4. In the traditional fixed-price model, from the day you agree to the project, your priorities are exactly opposite to those of the web developer – they want to do the least possible, as the price is fixed, and their profit is only influenced by the number of hours they put into the project, whereas you want them to spend as much quality time as possible on your project, as it costs you nothing. Usually, if you want to accomplish something together, the trick is to try to align the priorities. An hourly rate is much closer to this goal.

Costs

Believe it or not an hourly project is usually cheaper. For any type of project, the web developer needs calculate how much time the project will take. For a fixed price project there are a lot of unknowns so the web developer always builds in a percentage for the unknowns. So, in reality, you don’t get the lowest price, rather the safest price for the web developer.

Quality

You can get good quality under both types of projects.