I really enjoy the work and the reason I took it was to learn a lot more about front-end development. At the day gig, I do a lot of back-end work, along with about 15-20% client-side technologies - Silverlight (dead), WPF, and some MVC/Razor/Kendo stuff.

The part time gig is great. I enjoy working with the guy who is my contact at the company and the learning experience has been great.

But I'm wondering if I'm also selling my self short. I'm only charging $65/hr. There was a throw-away comment that the guy brought me aboard had made that leads me to believe that I could have gotten more, and the CIO has been impressed with the speed and quality of my work, so I've been thinking about how much I'm leaving on the table.

Now I live in the midwest (St. Louis) and have a very good base salary (120k/yr), and I'm doing about 40 hours on the freelance gig. The freelance gig consists of ASP.NET MVC 5, typescript, controller code, but also more of a consulting role as in "best practices", like "don't string concat a bunch of markup in the controller", and other such things.

In any case, we plan on buying a new house soon that might cost a pretty penny, so I'd like to bump up the rate to at least $80/hr without ill-will feelings on my part or their part if it doesn't go through...or even them begrudgingly giving me the money but having "secret hate".

There's lots of work to do still and I think they have deep pockets, so I (a) would love a high-paying job with them where I could work at home, so (b) don't want to generate ill-will, but (c) all gigs eventually come to an end so want to maximize my revenues while its hot.

Any advice is appreciated.