How do I calculate wages and prices when starting a software development company?

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There’s no hard and fast answers here. Ideally you’d pay your developers a market salary while you bill them out hourly to clients at perhaps double the rate. So an hour of a developer’s time costs you $100 an hour and you charge $200 for access. The times when your developers aren’t billing clients is made up for in the difference.

The hard part is ensuring you keep enough work in the pipe to keep everybody occupied. This is where the services of a good project manager come into play. The project manager acts as your eyes and ears on the client and does things like sell them on additional features, smooths over difficulties between the clients and the developers.

This way you can focus on getting more clients.

I don’t recommend paying developers hourly if you can avoid it. It gets hard to hold onto them that way. I jumped ship from the contractor to the client I was contracting for for this reason. When you pay developers hourly, they feel like hired guns, and mercenaries go where there’s the most gold and booty. You want to look like a nice safe kingdom and not like a pirate ship.