I'm in New York, everything is expensive so I thought it was pretty reasonable. For example, one job I gave an estimate on, would easily be a 100 hour job. So I gave an estimate of $5000. They wrote back to me and said they got another offer for $1500.
I'll defintely try raising my price.
Any thoughts on good places to look for work. I have been primarily using Craigslist. I've been getting a good amount of replies. I do not like the sites that make you bid for the work. Seems like that requires a lot of effort, for low prices.
Craigslist is practically the bottom of the barrel for freelancing.
There's a ton of other services and non-traditional sources including tech blogs like Techcrunch and GigaOm (sounds nuts, but biz people go through them).
In NYC, $50 is definitely too low, I think. Of course you didn't say what it is you're doing (reworking PHP scripts, or writing financial models in OCaml, or whatever), which makes a difference too.
I would add thought, that when asking remember that the person may not be telling the truth. They may actually want to hide something if they are doing it out of some personal prejudice they don't want to admit or because they have already made up their minds about the winner but are going through a bidding process for show.
Also, they may think they are telling the truth but actually being influenced by something they don't realize. For instnace, if the poster were unusually young they may feel he is immature or lacking experience even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
One way to at least mitigate this is to solicit opinons from many people that originally turned him down.
