How many hours do you think it will take you to do this? Take that number, add 20%, multiply by your hourly rate, and that's the estimate. So, if you say "100 hours", then I would give a dollar estimate of 120*15, or $1800. Round up for fudge and you have roughly $2000, or so.

Now, that's your hourly rate. My hourly rate is significantly higher than that. merlyn's hourly rate is going to be higher than both of us put together. Why? I'm more experienced that you seem to be and he blows both of us away. The hourly rate is a good descriptor of how complicated your work can be.

For example, merlyn is ridiculously productive building complex web applications. He knows the tools inside and out and probably has 80% of the product built before he walks in the door just from having components he's used on 30 jobs before yours. By the time you've finished telling him what you want, he already has it designed in his head and knows which modules he's using, what ideas he has to research, etc. He also knows what specifications you didn't tell him, meaning he can help you figure out what you really want before the first meeting is done.

You - you're probably going to churn a bit more. You're going to be spending time learning about the process along with building the product. There's a lot of gimmes and gotchas that even your pared-down list is exposing. A few items:

• A SS# doesn't have to be 9 numerical characters. 99% of the time, it will be, but that 1% will get you every time.
• How are you going to build the reports? What type of choices are you going to let your users have? Can they change the date range? What about the type of report? What about formats for seeing the report (HTML, PDF, XLS, RTF, etc)?
• What about writing a new report? How quickly will the company do that? One of my personal specialties is improving the time it takes to write a new report. My personal best is taking a process that required 40 developer hours to write a new report and cutting that to 4 hours.
• Maintenance in general is an issue. Are you going to write code that another Perl contractor can maintain? This is actually a problem for every Perl developer, not just the newbies. Somtimes, the experienced guys have more of a problem with this than the newbies.

In other words, $15/hr isn't unreasonable. But, you're probably going to be spending more than your estimate in hours, just in learning. I know I've been rambling, but it's a big questionspace.