In my last entry, I mentioned that I was raising my general consulting rate to $1000 an hour. This caused a miniature debate among my more conservative colleagues as to whether I was joking or insane. That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale.

Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names.

I played a major role in producing not one, but two number one titles on the App Store with Tap Tap Revenge and Apple’s new Mobile Store. That’s right, I’ve shipped product for Apple. That’s almost as cool as being on the team that made that app for the president. This isn’t just software, these are products that make world headlines. I can charge what I do because in a world of ripples, I make hits.

Then there are my intangible assets. Most software engineers grew up, went to college, and started working. I went out and lived life. I am, as Neal Stephenson wrote, “not one of those who followed the straight and narrow path to engineering.” Even now, rather than cloister myself in a mahogany room full of money, I am traveling the world, writing more books, and becoming even better at my job.

There are advantages to this rate. From my standpoint, I don’t have to deal with your hare-brained, half-assed competition. Nothing hurts me more than spending my time on someone who is too lazy or stupid to take my advice. If you are willing to drop a grand on something, I know you care about your product enough to make good use of my time.

That means I’m available. If I was still charging my pre-Apple rate of $150 an hour, you’d be lucky to get my attention this year, because I’d be busy writing code for your competitor. Instead, you immediately become my top priority, and I’m free to spring into action—typically on the same day. You also get guaranteed confidentiality—something you don’t get by just chatting me up.

I’m not going to pretend $1000 an hour is not a lot of money, nor that most problems can’t be solved by someone else for a lot less—but if you have a million-dollar app, there are some problems that are so important, only the best will do. For example, here are some situations that might require help from the World’s Toughest Programmer:

Product development — You’re sure you have an idea for the next big thing. You can spend a bunch of time and money fumbling toward turning that idea into a shippable product—or you can spend one hour with me and have a blueprint for a product that is marketable, monetizable, and pitchable.

Referrals and hiring — Building great products requires building a great company. Whether you are trying to build your core team or increase capacity, finding and hiring the right people is hard. Investing in employees is expensive and risky. Ameliorate that by tapping my experience and connections. Need a designer? I’ve worked with the best. Looking for a top-notch developer? They’re in my address book.

Motivational training — Engineering is a pursuit of lifelong learning. Whether you are trying to make a good team great, or trying to bring a team over from Java or Flash—platforms I happen to have experience on—I can do what I’ve done for audiences around the world and classes at Stanford: train your people, or just stop by for an informative chat.

Advisor check in — Once you’re up and running, you are going to have a lot of questions, technical and otherwise. Are you concentrating on the right things? Are you using the right technology? Are you doing something that puts you at risk for rejection? What’s the market doing? Are you keeping inline with its trends? Spend an hour with me every month and you, your boss, and your investors can sleep soundly.

User experience audit — Before you ship your masterpiece, you should always have an audit to ensure your interface meets user expectations by being appropriate to the platform. The best thing you can do is visit Apple’s User Experience Evangelist—all you have to do is get on their schedule and fly your team to Cupertino. Or you can tap my experience as an Apple Design Award winner and judge in your office tomorrow.

Advanced technical support — Your app has just been rejected by the App Store for crashing, but you can’t reproduce it, and your developers are in India. You can write to my former coworkers in Apple’s Developer Technical Support, and they will point you toward a solution within three days. Or you can just call me and have it ready to resubmit by morning.

Forensic code analysis — In a perfect world, nobody misrepresents themselves or exposes their employers to risk. In the real world, code review is required—especially when accusations of plagiarism or patent disputes are in the air. My résumé makes me uniquely qualified to examine your codebase and offer my professional opinion—or expert testimony—on its quality, consistency, and stylistic similarity to other code.

When Jules and Vincent are holed up at Jimmy’s and you need the Wolf, just email bmf at lemurs (as in, @ this domain) with your problem, and I’ll send you a client contract and the number to my iPhone.