50% sounds pretty normal to me. A firm can charge more because (not an exhaustive list):
- Freelancers tend to be flaky and just stop answering emails, but a firm is more likely to stick around. Businesses are often more risk-averse than price-averse, so they are happy to pay the firm's higher rates for lower risk. As a freelancer you suffer from a "market for lemons" phenomenon, where your rate suffers because there are lots of bad freelancers out there.
- A firm does more than programming. It does project management, design, communication, etc. Also they are experts on software development (not just implementation, but the whole thing), and their clients usually are not, so clients pay for their assistance and judgment.
- A firm has a "deep bench" (to use a sports analogy). Again this is a risk thing. Hiring a firm means that (in theory) your project won't fail because someone gets sick.
- A firm has wider expertise than one programmer. A client can use the iOS expert for their app and the Rails expert for their API.
There are probably more things than that but that's what I can see.
Of course this is just the theory. In reality by hiring a firm you often get one mediocre developer working with 2-3 junior ones, and quality might be passable but best. But at least with firms you are more likely dealing with a normal distribution, whereas freelancers seem to be bimodal: really good or really bad.
Anyway, I don't think 50% is unfair. But if you want to make more, you should partner with a few others and start finding your own clients!
- Freelancers tend to be flaky and just stop answering emails, but a firm is more likely to stick around. Businesses are often more risk-averse than price-averse, so they are happy to pay the firm's higher rates for lower risk. As a freelancer you suffer from a "market for lemons" phenomenon, where your rate suffers because there are lots of bad freelancers out there.
- A firm does more than programming. It does project management, design, communication, etc. Also they are experts on software development (not just implementation, but the whole thing), and their clients usually are not, so clients pay for their assistance and judgment.
- A firm has a "deep bench" (to use a sports analogy). Again this is a risk thing. Hiring a firm means that (in theory) your project won't fail because someone gets sick.
- A firm has wider expertise than one programmer. A client can use the iOS expert for their app and the Rails expert for their API.
There are probably more things than that but that's what I can see.
Of course this is just the theory. In reality by hiring a firm you often get one mediocre developer working with 2-3 junior ones, and quality might be passable but best. But at least with firms you are more likely dealing with a normal distribution, whereas freelancers seem to be bimodal: really good or really bad.
Anyway, I don't think 50% is unfair. But if you want to make more, you should partner with a few others and start finding your own clients!