Why are the hourly rates so high?

You may feel like the hourly rates that you see on the site are unrealistically high.  Few points on that.  The rates should not be more than 10% or 20% higher than what the developer has actually charged recently.  I've been spot checking this manually - obviously we don't have any way to know 100% for certain that they're telling the truth but over time we'll have better data on that.

So what that means is that these are likely the top end of the rate that these developers charge.  Are all of them making this much every day 40 hours per week?  Probably not.  Just in the same sense that on Clarity, not everyone up there is making $5/minute every minute of the day 40 hours per week.

One of the features we'll likely be adding soon is a separate field for people to privately indicate what the lowest rate is that they would accept.  We can use this to match developers to jobs better.

But what's important to realize if you're experiencing sticker shock when looking at these rates is that the Magento market is a very competetive and hot market.  The whole reason we've built this marketplace is because we've heard over and over how impossible it is to find a good Magento developer.

One of the elements of our thesis with this business is that it's not quite that impossible if you're paying the right price and offering projects that match the interests of the developers you're looking to attract.

We are thinking of ways to allow smaller businesses to find developers at more competitive rates and that will be getting rolled out soon.  While we want Magento developers to be paid well, we also believe that by matching the right project to the right developer, we can achieve competitive rates that ultimately enable the merchant to run their business as cost effectively as possible.