Should we Charge Extra for IE Development?

The exact question was worded this way: Has the time come to charge clients extra for getting their site to work in any version of IE? It’s an interesting question to say the least, and one that comes up every so often when a developer is frustrated with something that works fine in Chrome/Firefox/Safari but not IE. There’s not really an easy answer to this because it all depends on why this question gets asked so often. There is a difference between charging more because of a project’s complexity and charging more because you don’t want to deal with something.

[bctt tweet=”Charging more due to complexity vs. because you don’t want to deal with it are different.” username=”jcasabona”]

More Complex Should Equal More Money

The first notion is a no-brainer, right? If something is going to take you longer, then yes, you charge more. This can be said of anything, but that’s not a question that’s framed the same way as Should we charge more for IE?

If someone seriously asked, “Should we start charging more to add e-commerce support,” the answer is yes and you’d get berated for even asking such a silly question. Adding e-commerce to a website is a long process, will take many more hours of development and testing, and add quite a bit of complexity. Not charging would be a disservice to both you and your client, as quality will surely suffer.

More complexity should equal more money because some value is being added to the project.

If You Don’t Want to Deal with It, It’s not a Good Fit

The other side of this discussion is that some people don’t want to deal with coding for IE; doing so is such a hassle they feel they should charge more. I call this a “Pain in the Ass” or PITA tax and it’s an admission that you and the project are not a good fit.

When I started freelancing, I would take on any client that would have me. If I thought a client would be a problem to deal with, I would charge a PITA tax just for having to work with them. This is at the beginning of the process, before contracts are drawn up and money is exchanged.

The truth is we weren’t a good fit for each other, but I refused to recognize that. Those projects never went well. It’s the same thing with IE support; if you are annoyed at the start of a project by a client’s request, you’re probably not a good fit for the project.

I have been on both sides of the discussion; I’ve been told I need to support IE8 and was none-too-happy about it. But I still did it, because that’s what my client, and therefore their users, needed. I have also been the client where a dev shop actually said to us, “We don’t support IE8 because it’s hard.” I had several choice words for this dev shop.

Let’s look at it a different way.

What if someone asked, “Has the time come for us to charge extra for responsive?” This is a very common feature, one that most users need and clients ask for, and is likely built-in to the cost of the project. The question doesn’t need to be asked because it’s already being accounted for. That can be even more of a pain than coding for IE at times, but there’s no stigma because it’s widely agreed that we should make our websites responsive.

Charging more because you don’t want to deal with supporting IE means you’re not a good fit for the project; you want to impose a tax on your client because of the needs of their users.

[bctt tweet=”Taxing IE use is essentially saying I care less about the needs of you and your users.” username=”jcasabona”]

The Reality of Supporting IE

As web developers or even savvy computer users, we probably have nice computers; I have a Mac with a beautiful screen and Chrome installed. We never use IE, and neither should anyone else.

The reality is that a sizable amount of users still default to IE (about 15% last I checked). Aside from that, if a client is asking specifically for support of an older browser, there is likely some constraint on their end and they need that support to operate.

The responsible thing to do would to charge as you would for other constraints, based on how much complexity the constraint adds. Don’t just tack on an extra charge because they ask for IE. Supporting browsers is the web developer’s job.

[bctt tweet=”Supporting browsers is our job as web developers” username=”jcasabona”]