I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:

I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.

> finds awesome software
> finishes trial period
> looks at pricing
> looks at bank account
> cries in a corner

Sysadmin pricing...

Haven’t been on here for ages, but I felt like I needed to post this:

Warning:
This is long, and it might make you cry.

Backstory:
A couple of months back I worked for a completely clueless dude who had somehow landed a contract for a new website for a huge company. After a while he realised that he was incapable of completing the assignment. He then hired me as a subcontractor and I deleted literally everything he had done and started from scratch. He had over promised and under explained what needed to be done to me. It took many sleepless nights to get this finished with all the amendments and I had to double my pricing because he kept changing the brief.

Even after doubling my prices I still put in way too many hours of work. At one point I had enough and just ghosted the guy as I had done what he asked, and when he submitted it to them they wanted changes. He couldn’t make the changes, so I had to. He wouldn’t pay me extra though. I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

A couple of days ago I heard from him again. He had found another subcontractor to finish the changes. He still needed a few things though, so he promised me that I would get paid after fixing those things. I looked at the few things he had listed in our KANBAN and thought it was a few easy tasks.. until I opened the project..

I had my computer set up to sync with his server because he wanted everything done live and in production. So I naturally thought I would just “sync down” everything that the other subcontractor had done.

Here is where the magic started to happen.. I started the sync and went to grab a glass of water, and it was still running when I came back. I looked at the log and saw a bunch of “node_module” files syncing - around 900 folders. Funny thing is; neither the site nor server has anything to do with node..

I disregarded this and downloaded the files in a more manual fashion to a new folder. Interestingly I could see that my SCSS folders had not been touched since I stopped working on the project.. interesting, I thought to myself..

Turns out, the other subcontractor had taken my rendered and minimised CSS file, prettified it and worked from there. This meant that the around ~1500 lines of SCSS neatly organised in around 20 files was suddenly turned into a monster of a single CSS file of no less than 17300 lines.

I tried to explain to the guy that the other subcontractor had fucked up, but he said that I should be able to fix it since I was the one that made it initially. I haven’t replied. My life is too short for this.

* How other sites charge for a domain name
- The domain (abc.com) is available
---- Price => $14

* How AWS charges
- Your domain (abc.com) is available
--- Domain name => $18.99
--- DNS resolution => $17.88
--- Hosted zone (1) => $10.97
--- Route53 Interface => $45.67
--- Network ACL => $63.90
--- Security Group => $199.78
--- NAT Gateway (1) => $78.99
--- IP linking => $120.89
--- Peer Connection => $67.00
--- Reverve Endpoint => $120.44
--- DNS Propagation => $87.00
--- Egress Gateway => $98.34
--- DNS Queries (1m) => $0.40
--------------------------------
---- TOTAL => $2903.99
(Pay for what you use... learn more)
--------------------------------

I love how some services have trap pricing, pretty much like drug dealers of the interwebs.

Me: I would like to send e-mail to my clients.

Company: Sure bro, here, take our service, you can send emails to all your clients, just 5€ per month!

A year later

Me: I have now over thousand customers, I would like to send more emails and implement some new features.

Company: Thousand customers you say?

Me: Yeah

Company: All in our servers you say?

Me: Yeah, thanks for the great service!

Company: Sure, no problem. We can enable you additional services for 40 000€ per month, half of your liver and two of your first born babies.

--- Github unveils another round of pricing changes ---

In a move that slipped under the radar with some surprising ease, Microsoft-owned repo wrangler Github unveiled yesterday (7th January) a new set of changes to their pricing model. Unlike the last round of changes that saw unlimited private repos gracing anybody with $7 in their pocket each month - The new round sees everyone on the platform receiving unlimited private repos in a move that's been met with some serious scepticism from the community.

The company's surprisingly brief PR emission (via their official blog) states that they've made 2 major changes, "Github Free now includes unlimited private repositories" - the catch being that you're limited to adding 3 collaborators, which appears to be a move aimed squarely at businesses attempting to operate without forking over the cash for an organisation.

In addition to this there's many vague statements about the kinds of scenarios that "are now possible" via "Github free", the kind of vague nonsense that makes trousers considerably tighter in the PR department.

It would appear that anyone who was previously paying the $7 a month is now a "Pro" user, The PR emission states that "Github Pro (formerly Github Developer) and Github team are also available for developers and teams who need professional coding and collaboration features".

It doesn't seem like you're being offered a whole lot for your $7 a month anymore - a move that would be considered by almost any other company in tech as a good thing, but given that it's Microsoft has been met with warranted suspicion and concern.

Or we could just be being a set of Donny Downers about it, who knows shrug

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

When you find a tool / service online, go to the pricing page and it has a "get a quote now" button.

You can already tell its a massive rip off, but they feel the need to explain to you why.

Son of a... insurance tracker
You hit delete and I’m stuck with this reply!?!

Stuff it, I’ll rant about it instead of commenting.

How’s an insurance e company any different to google tracking your every move, except now it’s for “insurance policy premiums” and setting pricing models on when, how, and potentially why you drive.

Granted no company should have enough gps data to be able to create a behaviour driven ai that can predict your where and when’s with great accuracy.

The fight to remove this kind of tech from our lives is long over, now we have to deal with the consequences of giving companies way to much information.

- good lord, I sound like a privacy activists here, I think I’ve been around @linuxxx to long.

I’ve been contracted to build a website using Wix... I’ll refrain from ranting. They want simplicity after the fact that it’s already created... I’ll give them that.

My question is how much would you charge for this? I’ve tampered with it in the past but not “really” used Wix.

If some of you could give me some advice on pricing, I’d appreciate it. Hourly rates or a lump some preferably. I’ve got a meeting with them this evening to determine what they’d like to see and how many pages etc.

Thanks in advance.

I had forgotten why I hated GoDaddy so much.. until today. It all came back to me.

I have been a GoDaddy customer for over 5 years now. Last year I tried out Namecheap for the first time because someone who was sending me a domain asked me to create an account on NC.

A couple of days on NC and I fell in love with the support and pricing. I started transferring all my domains to NC over the year. (30+)

Now I was left with 3 domains, 1 of them was to expire 4 days ago. but 5 days ago, GoDaddy switched it to pending mode, barring me from transferring to domain or changing any details.

today I called GoDaddy and after a loooong chat, they fucking forced me to renew my domain!! Saying that I need to renew the domain before I attempt to make any more changes!!!

FUCK YOU GODADDY! THIS IS WHY I NEVER SEND CLIENTS YOUR WAY!!!

Fuck Apple right in the eye hole for trying (and probably succeeding) to normalize phone pricing at hundreds of dollars above the current market. This is going to make Android OEMs follow suit, and the world gets a little shittier for everyone.

I'm so fucking sick of the lack of great modern open source DB tooling.

MySQL Workbench can go suck a big fat herpes-ridden cock, it's horrible.

Dbeaver is a clunky 90's tool, which charges two Netflixes (yes, that is a valid $/month monetary unit) just to connect to a NoSQL DB.

Datagrip is nice, but has the same outrageously expensive pricing. I paid for it, and couldn't use it for my local docker DB during my holiday because it couldn't connect to the license server. Fuck you, Jetbrains. Your software is nice, but your DRM makes me hate you.

And then ERD software... It's either some hard-to-use afterthought piece of crap bundled with the DB IDE, some generic diagramming tool which makes DB-specific work needlessly unergonomic, or some vendor-locked online tool.

Fuck this shit, I'm making my own DB admin tool. With blackjack. And hookers. 😡

Freelance web devs:

How do you handle pricing? By page or by hour? What's your rates?

Can someone explain the pricing for DO, AWS, or any other cheap hosting? DO $15 bucks for 1 database or multiple database in one server? AWS S3 or E2? Or should I stick with Heroku $7 (Web App server) and $9 for Postgres database?

Best pricing ever XD

Just got an email with a new really nice douche-bag move from Postman to raise their prices again (this time for almost double) on their paid plans with excuse "it will help us deliver more of what our customers need from us."

Even though I've decided to look other way around for years on their electron-based garbage of bloated app, have not been a fan of their pricing 8$/month/user just for a simple feature such as sharing request schema and environment data.

This simply needs to stop and I'm seriously thinking about doing something about it. 🙄

corporate emails and what they mean
- “changes to our privacy policy” — we raised capital, time for you to leave! good times are over.
- “changes to our pricing” — we are basically acquired, leave now.
- “blah blah community help blah blah” — fuck you, we can't even be bothered to fix bugs in our product.
- “blah blah 30% off blah blah” — yup, the unsubscribe button was broken last time you clicked it.

Today somebody claimed they have the "copyright" of responsive websites.

First of all, I'm here for almost a year now, but this is my first rant. Hello guys!
(linuxxx, call me)

This didn't happen to me.

So, it begins like this:
Some client called us and said "[INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] called us and said they have the copyright of all responsive websites, asking money."

I hanged up, laughed hard and visited [INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] website and saw this:

- Each website that uses the solution must report the domain name in order to register it.
- If a company undertakes web site design, it is the company responsibility to inform and record.
- Any unauthorized website will be considered unauthorized and a violation case will be opened.
...

Pricing (Currency Converted to Dollars)
1 Website ~$260
2 - 10 Website ~$1300
...

Well, eventually I reported this to government. I unmasked this fraud.
OR DID I?

Their site is saying this now: "We do not serve this to anyone except government now, you are making nonsense and we do not want nonsense."

So I posted it on a forum, asking what can we do.

We are suing this company now. Yeah, I said "we".

PS: If we cannot win this, I'll get the copyright of subdomains.

Corp: you will get a four hour assignment to work out
Me: cool nice.
Corp: here it is, build a dragon with conflicting requirements, stocks but without any form of pricing mixed in. Then slay that dragon and post it to the static backend we created.
Me: cringe much?
Corp: yeah, you can spend more than 4h but be sure to spice things up abit. Since it is frontend, and all we spin up from the backend is flat data. But it must exhale an exciting user experience.
Me: stop the cringe pls!

I may have over delivered my service to this first customer i got.

It doesn't help that pricing was dirt cheap and i over promised in a bid to make it attractive.

But in my hurry to please the client, I've been feeling so much stress since last 24 hrs. Dealing with customers suck. I hate this.

They can be little dumb and doesn't think much before blaming you if something's not working as expected.

I hate this feeling and now i remember why my initial business model was designed such that I wouldn't have to deal with clients.

But somewhere along the way, i forgot about that. :/

I wish I could get rid of this customer.

A beautiful gem ticket from a manager today:

Title: "Check Stripe "Snippet APK" that might help for integration into the app to track pricing easily."

Alright, it's very clear this particular individual has no idea what they are talking about, but, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and read the ticket description!

Description: "I think stripe offers some sort of snippet that can be implemented into the app similar to FB pixel. (I could be wrong here..) let’s briefly check this, if it’s of value for our A/B-Tests → e.g. if it makes your life easier = good otherwise it’s not important."

...

I might as well replace the management team with GPT-3 at this point.

Or even just a simple Markov chain; that'd probably be more accurate if you want to match the ticket quality more exactly of this ABSOLUTE PILE OF HORSESHIT WASTE OF TIME I GET FED EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY.

🤡

My sister's laptop ate shit the other day and she ordered a new one. She got me thinking about my five year old rig, and how it was starting to show its age, so started half-heartedly pricing the stats I would want in a new machine on newegg and Amazon for fully assembled machines, and was always getting gouged or having to make some kind of sacrifice for another feature.

So after my wife responded to me trying to sound offhanded about buying a new computer by only rolling her eyes, but not actually raising any actual objection, I committed to the idea and started searching in earnest.

I realized that a fully assembled machine would always cost more, be underpowered for its price, be basically impossible to upgrade, be made of shitty parts, and always require some kind of compromise on my part.

Normally in the past, i would go to the barebones section on Pricewatch, order the basic stats I wanted, and fill it in myself after that. But it appears that Pricewatch might be dead. So, for the first time since probably 2002 or so, I'm building a computer in its entirety.

I'm really excited. Everything should be here by the middle of next week.

Hey Chris can you join this conference call where we will talk about hardware and pricing options and not bring up anything software related.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

Question

What server monitoring do you use, both for statistics and security?

--------------------
tl;dr ends here

Ideally I would like to have one clean dashboard that shows me all the nodes I have, proxmox already offers a great range of stats - but it is a page per container etc. so not ideal, I thought of having datadoghq, but their per host pricing is huge, since I have more than 5 hosts to track.

So I told my partner in not buying a Mac and that in buying a base model pixelbook instead, showed her the pricing and she nearly strangled me...

Why is it so hard to be a Google fan and have to import litteraly everything with an extra 400 AUD tacked on -,-

nobody :
Literally nobody :
Microsoft : Great news ! We added integrated blockchain in Azure SQL !

How about fixing :
performance issues
Stability issues
Reservations issues
Pricing
vCore counting

My department vp announced to our sales team that our company would have an online Web based catalog capable of custom style configuration, pricing calculation, quote generation. the catalog would manage all of our customers different discount rates automatically and notify the correct sales rep any time a customer completes a quote. This was announced on September 30(ish) with a launch date of December 1. I'm the only Web developer and I found out afer the announcement. :/

We don't have a designer yet in the team so we had to learn Adobe XD on the side to prototype our ideas. After months of getting the hang of it thinking this semi-free tool will work for us to save some money, Adobe decides to change their pricing plans starting in April 2020 and it will no longer be free. It feels like Adobe trapped us to get used to their platform and then secretly slap us with a price tag halfway. We can't blame them since we're all trying to put food on the table here. We started exploring Figma today and oh boy was it a gift from the gods! The features are so much better. They make our workflow faster!

When GitHub updates their pricing structure which sucks!

We want one system for all our branches with booking and (inserts 73 huge features crucial to business operations)

- okay, *sends quotation*

You know, we just want a custom made website with (insert 23 major features)

- okay, *sends quotation*

You know, we want a wordpress site, we can expand late

- ...

I'm kind of triggered by all these social media posters and SEO optimizers and "wordpress developers", it's one of the oldest internet scam "jobs" in my eyes where anyone can do what they are doing, yet somehow they are getting paid absurd amounts of money for who knows what. I'm just triggered by how much these people get away with. And stupid ass "companies" that I see all over first google results whose pricing starts from 5k and they're resumes are stock unmodified fucking wordpress themes that cost 39-59 bucks. WHAT THE FUCK. I just want to make a huge wave about this, this is straigh up scaming people. I couldn't live with myself if I would charge this amounts of money for installing a fucking wordpress theme and uploading a few photos. Are you kidding me. And seo scammers? is writting a 200 word essay with fucking yoast seo optimisation worth a few hundred? IS IT?

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Hetzner. Very cheap no nagging, no support bullshit, Lots of options, Just does what it does.
Did I mention their pricing?

We have new AI platforms popping out the internet every seconds. Now the problem is why the heck should I pay $499/month for your shinny new shit!

Come on guys let's face it, we all price dev according to how fun it feels.

How do you guys know how much to ask for freelance work? I'm always scared to ask too much and lose a client

That idiot client who tell you he wants a pricing table but actually means he wants a configurable pricing system with discounts, coupon codes, paypal enabled subscription and recurring payments with logic to upgrade and downgrade subscriptions while in middle of one.

Salesforce. Although I wasn't involved in the purchase or the implementation, I spent many 100 hour weeks dealing with the crapshoot of an implementation. A large company abused that software to the point of no return. They used that thing for everything, and then they didn't even use it right for the one thing salesforce is good at. So I guess I don't have anything against salesforce itself besides its scalability issues, custom SOQL syntax, user model, and pricing. I'm more upset about the salesforce developers/business owners that decided it was okay to use salesforce for things it was never meant for, like inventory, project management, 3rd party sales team, and so many other things that caused what should have been sub-second queries to take 30 to 60 seconds.

Dear Client,

If you could go ahead and decide your product pricing instead of having me publish the wrong pricing and get all your customers excited only for them to see you double the price later? That'd be greeeeaaaat. M'kay?

P.S. I make money when you make money. You're gonna lose money now. Lots of it.

TIL, shopify plus has whopping 4 requests per second rate limit on their admin rest api's... I don't know how much we pay them but shopify plus pricing starts at $2000 monthly, for a fucking FOUR requests per SECOND.

Oh Lord give me the strength and the brainpower to step a way from freelancing or at least overcome the humongous pile of shite tied to the aforementioned barely lucrative activity.
AMEN !!

Recently got a client. We had an agreement on requirements, deadlines and on pricing. It's a job that can be done in a week if all the resources are at hand.
He reaches back a couple of days later and says :

Him: Listen I am on an intermediate...
Me: Mmhmm.
Him: I had a talk with the actual owner and he can only pay you in June.
Me: I see, but that I can't do. That means if the website is live by the 15th I'll have to wait for 2 weeks at least before getting paid.
You'll have to come up with something that makes more sense.

fml.

Service I was needed to integrate to our system had such poor documentation and a separate pricing tier to access their APIs...

... Not having it. Used Guzzle to perform both the authentication and their search page, then made wrote a function to web scrape the result.

Job done. 😎 And yes, I have no shame to say I love PHP.

It's so frustrating, how people don't want to pay well for services and all, but what's more frustrating is that I don't even know how much to ask for most times! 😥

Went into a client meeting to present pricing, timescales etc. for custom web app. After a short period of chit chat they tell me they've gone way over budget. They explain to me that they'll need to close their business if they don't get this thing built (the business consists of him and the other guy at the meeting). They currently have a website that is an e-commerce type deal, apart from the checkout process doesn't work! They basically want me to do it for free.

I may consider if I was going to benefit from new clients etc. but I'm not.

However, the problem is that one of my companies has been (IT) supporting this guy's other company for around 5 years. It's a bit of a shitty situation as that contract accounts for about 15% of our income.

That meeting was last Monday and I told them I would think about it. I have another meeting this Friday and am thinking I'm going to have to break the news gently ffs.

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

everyone want the best tech and services until they see the pricing

Pricing:

With AWS <Service>, you pay only for what you use. You are charged based on the amount of granular data generated on a monthly basis.

Literally. Every.Fucking.Service.

(was just talking to Root now, and it reminded me of this)

You know what I fucking hate about Android phones? They do stupid shit like update your keyboard WHILE you are typing. Hate Apple as I may for having inferior hardware and ridiculous pricing, the iPhone is more worth having than Android. I simply find the features a lot better executed on iPhone than Android, almost across the board

For you freelancers out there, I've been working on trying to make some income with it locally, making single page static sites for some local businesses and restaurants so that I can get a couple hundred for making the site and a little over the cost of hosting each month residually, offering like one free menu change per month, but all redesigns and support being hourly.
I want it to be accessible pricing cause like 5 of my favorite places to eat have defunct sites that I think weren't worth the cost anymore, and I'd love to be able to see up to date menus and hours and I'm certain others would too.
Basically, I'm trying to figure out what hosting would be best for this and if I'm being realistic enough with pricing. I like the idea of surge.sh, but I feel like 12/mo for a custom domain SSL, which is good for SSL, is higher than some of the other alternatives for a lightweight one sing page site.
Any help would be great, Have a great new year guys!

Freelance web devs: where can I find some examples of industry standard pricing?

My partner has an opportunity to design a site for a newspaper she writes for, but has never done this before and doesn’t know what to quote...

For those of you .Net people out there (".Net sucks" Stallman fellators need not apply), what would a few practice .net core web apis and MVC projects cost to host on Azure? They wouldn't be touched except by me and any people who want to see my portfolio projects directly, so I think that doesn't count as time for cost, but I'll be honest and say I don't entirely get their pricing.

Sure, Amazon...

I took this freelance job from an undergrad student, her *final project* in her final year.

It's a cool idea with NLP and I was excited. Did three webpages as a show of my prowess and discussed an amount with her after she was satisfied... she seemed okay with the pricing.

Fast forward, three weeks pass and I don't hear from her (we had agreed that I would have to carry her along, so she could defend it). After alot of unanswered msgs, I stop working, assuming she's changed her mind.

Present Day. I stumble into her and I ask what the hell happened?

She: "I thought you were working on it!"
Me: "Jesus Christ! What about my messages?!"
She: ...
"But, we kinda have only till the 28th of the month before final defense..."

F***, now I'll spend my birthday month rush coding and fixing bugs that I could have done at my own pace!

“I can’t wait for all those breaking changes, mismatched package versions, new build tool configurations, virtual boxes, and CI setup!” ~ hourly billing

“Let’s use HTML.” ~ value pricing

What the fuck is this trend of pricing cloud services by the minute? I mean It's fucking great and all that I buy 2 minutes with a sql db but who the fuck actually does that?

After another night working on a server I (strongly) suggest we move our shit to a cloud service. It's cool providing I promise the costs don't rape us blind folded. Seems easy enough, right? Nope it's not.

6 hours later, halfway to becoming a fucking network engineer and I'm more lost than ever.

Seriously can't the fuck AWS and google cloud show a monthly price - even an estimate for generic shit like $x for the average crappy wp blog!

If anyone has some helpful info / experience on the true cost of hosting generic web apps - the retardedly simple app I'm trying to price is:
1 php web application with 150 domains, 3gb mysql db and 30gb ssd.

I gets has 45000 sessions with 250000 page views.

Your help would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm leaning towards deploying a clone sending 250 000 random requests and praying my $300 cloud platform credit will cover the bill.

Let me just say that I've been playing whack a mole with a new feature for while now. And it's becoming very tiring.

TLDR; CTO is changing the way we're going to implement this, every other day.

June 1st,
CEO: let's implement feature AAA,
CTO: we're going to have a call with Andy to tell us all about his product that will make this super easy, call will be June 4th.

Days before June 4th,
Me: Researchs product X, makes demo works flawlessly.

June 4th,
Call all good, few tips from Andy. We come to the pricing section of Product X

CTO: this will not work, pricing doesn't fit on our budget, fair enough.

June 7th -11th
Me: research altenative approach. Makes second demo.

CTO: Works good, seems to have too many moving parts, let's have call with Bob to check Product Y. It should make our lifes easier.

ME: Geee, ok let's check it out.

June 14th,

Call with Bob, all good, product has a fair price, stuff is experimental.

CTO: let's use Product Y, and just use what we get from their api now, and worry about changes later.

Me: Hmmm, that's a bit risky, but ok, you the boss, right?, starts again new demo. API doesn't work as documented.

Lots of trial and error to figure out how the api is working now, finally demo works well,

June 17th,

API changed, now it works as documented, (expected as it is experimental), previous demo doesn't work anymore.

June 18th,

Redoing research. inputs are completely different from Product Y now, need to redo all that is working and do and a lot more of research.

Go live is scheduled for end of next week, I hope that the API is stable now, and that I get to go live on schedule.

It is funny to see, that it would probably been the same if we just waited on the API to stabilize, and check the pricing section before choosing a product? Who knows.

Anyways, I actually feel happy that over the years I developed the patience to work with ever changing situations like this one.

Just ordered a Logitech G413 for 78(!!)€. This is a good deal, can't relate why gaming keyboards are around 100€ at all.

I’m working on buying a license from a company with completely opaque pricing. To the point they are asking me what I want to pay and then getting offended with I low ball them! WTF do you expect?! List some freaking prices.

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

I've just started freelancing on PeoplePerHour. I'm in talks to secure a job migrating a C# webapp to a desktop scenario using HTML5 embedded within WPF, but I've never done this as a solo project before. What sort of price is sensible to charge for this? I'm working in GBP

Looks like I'll be forced to buy Surface Pro 4 instead of macbook pro.

Amazons pricing is disappointing

Fuck yeah ... I have uploaded my major computation file to S3 and create Lambdas from those files(includes numpy and pandas also) and now I have only routes and invoke strategies in my EC3 .. looking for cost reduction....

Hi )

I was wondering how do you guys who work or have worked as freelancers price your websites/projects.
I never had a client before and I don't want to spoil my first chance by pricing too high or too low.
I've heard people asking for 500 dollar or 2000 dollars, depending on how much work and time is involved.
How much would you ask for a simple personal website or a restaurant website?

Thank you very much for your time )

A forum admin started requesting donations and threatening to kill the site if nobody pitched in because it was much too expensive and stuff. The classic wikipedia strat.

The thread was pinned and it was the first thing anyone would see when they'd go into the subforum.

Someone asked the admin how come he needed that much money monthly to keep the forum alive and asked if he could provide a breakdown of the things that needed to be paid.

Admin unpinned the thread and went silent. The amount he was asking was about $80 per month. Is that normal?

Dear RFP lady: Yeah, I'd love to help you - but I already know for a fact - that after I spend 3 hours pricing out your half-brained project - you'll just use my insight to drive up the price and then I'll never hear from you again. And btw, I see how those projects turn out. Not well.

bunq, N26 or revolut? I am also a bit sceptical because of brexit - i am sure it would affect revolut. I don't like the pricing of n26 but the metal MasterCard looks sexy and I love the features of bunq.
Not sure which bank I should choose...

Has anyone here got some more info about those three mobile first banks?

Gotta love waking up to a notification from Apple Seed saying "iMac Pro is now available."

Since I did sales I knew some pricing ahead of time, but after looking at the upgrades and the max price, all I can say is, what the fuck.

Welp, that was enough of Apple for the day.

remember before wordpress and the likes came out when you could charge thousands of dollars for a website ?

I just seen github's new pricing model. Does it make sense to switch from a self hosted gitblit server? And what free-cheap ci servers do they have?

Anyone using GitHub in India? What's the monthly pricing in rupees for the personal plan?

Github just dropped the prices of the team/ Pro plans. Do we need to thank covid for this??

I have a doubt. I work as a freelancer. I always randomly charge my clients. Because I have no idea about other freelancer's pricing or market price. Currently, I'm working on a website that is very similar to DropBox. The only difference between my project and DropBox is the frontend design. I am doing the only backend of that project with python(flask). How much should I charge?

Google Cloud Platform.

- Fair pricing (no dumping prices to win customers)
- Easy to setup
- reliable infrastructure
- speed
- connectivity
- industry leader
- C'mon, it's google ;)

Does anyone know a relevant alternative to Atlassian's JIRA? Damn their pricing is like 10$ for 10 people and 250$ for 25 people. WTF

Please provide a raw price for a "normal" android app budget.
Me i start with 20k
And client must pays 1k per month for maintenance after production
Location: switzerland. What it ur price/location

Cheers

How hard should it be to create a functioning webpage with readable text that works in Microsoft Edge? (garbled pricing info at a swedish operator called Vimla)

The monthly subscriptions plans are an open theft of customers money because of variable number of days in a month.

It's basically free money for companies with monthly pricing strategy.

Any recommendations for an ionic build alternative? The new version sucks pricing wise.

I'm starting a project from scratch using Node MySQL Angular stack api based. Which hosting is best for handling file uploads? Vultr, Digital Ocean, Heroku or Linode? This is for a startup so AWS, Azure and GCP may not be an option for now. Maybe in the future but for now I want simple pricing.

What hosting can you recommend to me? Thanks!

Most Pricing pages be like:
________________________________________
Premium | Premium | Premium | Premium
freemium | recommend | unlimited | enterprise

Runaway when you see such... It's all premium dog poop!

Client would say we do not want to be billed on per manpower basis, but on entire managed service basis

However, the pricing for managed services they would agree on, can only pay for a team of 4, and the project requires a team of 8

finishing existing projects, resurrecting abandoned projects with dev friends from uni (where we had actual customers calling us and saying they wanna pay us, but we are idiots and couldn't come up with effective pricing)

meanwhile learn proper JS (and node.js, also getting from noob to pro in vue.js/vuex and react/redux)

also getting better in linux server management

I’m meeting an acquaintance who wants to discuss a web app idea they‘d like to have developed. I’ve always worked full-time and have no experience running a side gig, scoping a project or what questions to ask. I would appreciate any advice on how to approach this meeting and any resources that will help with scoping/pricing.

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

I was checking Notesnook pricing, guess for who they wrote the price as "Your Data"

Building a click/link insight tool. Might leverage geobytes.com. Nice API's, geolocation data and free/low cost pricing.

Hey!

I am trying to learn creating games for android (+- 0 android expirience).

I figured I could use GoDot for it's awesome pricing (free, no strings attached).

I've done few minor things, but, to be perfectly honest, I'm fed up of GDscript. I just internally hate it more every single time I touch it, so recently I stopped attempts to learn doing games for droid/iOS.

I'm looking for free alternative to godot, preferably no strings attached, but wahtever... Here is what I need:
- I prefer code, but doing stuff in GUI is fine, but stuff like making level etc, preferably in UI
- C++ derrived syntax (ex. c# etc. c++ is fine too), no BS like some wacky workaround to do basic shit like 2d array....
- easy android/iOS export (like in godot, one day I was attempting to hello world in android and compiling for first time... was quite an advanture)
- objects
- some easy way for restfull apis
Good to have:
- ability to test project without android VM
- observer pattern (signals/slots)

I don't care what structure it's made, for me milion of scenes on one screen was extremly coutner-intuitive but meh, whatever. As long as it's possible to learn, it is fine.

Can devranters help, please?

Thanks,
peace.

Oh boy, do I really need a new account once again?

Co-worker with 20 years of "computer" experience, and another that's a graphic designer who has never used Illustrator make suggestions to the owner about what's best for the site... claims the problems he is having with Pricing wouldn't happen if he wasn't using WooCommerce, because "it's really only good for small sites, not sites with 3000 items or more..."
I died a little inside from laughing, as the problems are coming from a custom plugin created by his dev!
n00bs

!rant
As a freelancer, how much should I charge per hour for full stack db and web app?

DigitalOcean, really just because of the pricing. I will say though that kubernetes in Google cloud is much better than what DO offers, so if cost wasn't an issue I'd probably prefer it

Building an AI enabled image transformation product similar to Cloudinary with better functionalities, pricing and flexibility. Targeting B2B clientele.

What is your opinion on this?

Just asking , food for thought really, any alternatives for firebase (database) in terms of pricing for connecting it to a website hosted by github.

Wasted a day fighting the breaking changes and new bugs over at Google Cloud Build's GitHub integration (alpha)... I had a good CI/CD flow that is broken now because of the change... anyway, I will switch over to Circle CI... have had enough of alpha bugs for the next few months... Google Cloud Build does have an attractive pricing (free 120 build minutes per day) and a whopping 10 concurrent builds limit... but it is only supported by the community and you don't get a lot of active developers feedbacks...

Should I Price my addition to a paid software?
I Ranted about a program that was unfinnished and began writing a sample software that the programmer can use. With the recent update he placed his quote to HQ in the same Dropbox folder as the .exe,
Should I Share the code or Should i charge him?

I now know why Google Clouds sucks compared to AWS, and Azure.

1. No free tier
2. Pricing is confusing and designed for comp scis
3. Too componentized.

I wanted to translate text in an image like Google Translate/Lens.

Google: after a long search of the site's developer docs, I need the Translate and Vision APIs which have separate pricing specified in hours and task type

Microsoft: search Translate API,
Does images, first 5 million characters are free

hi guys, I wonder if you can help me, I've been asked by my Line Manager to liase with an app building firm that is going to make an Angular APP and host it on AWS (Amazon Web Services). I've never used AWS before and have no idea what to expect for pricing.

The APP will be educational, questions, answers and resources like slides, text and video etc and available to 400 pupils over 5 schools in place of regular workbooks that they currently use but are unable to due to covid-19.

So that's 2000 pupils all told. What AWS services should I use and what is a fair bill I can expect from them in the UK. The boss is insistent that we have our own AWS account and self host the app when it's done.

I have no experience of this at all so any help will be appreciated. Cheers everyone in advance!

Also the AWS website is a confusing mess and their chat options are not working at the time of posting this lol.

So if only one query on a firestore collection returns 1000 documents, this is considred as 1000 read ?
Or only one ?
Docs say 1000 !

And since the cache os 30min long, if the user came to the same and open it 30sec later, ill be charged for 1000 reads ?

Well well well !

Hey what's up?🗣️

Please I Want to know some tips when it comes to work pricing.

Thanks in advance