5 ms·

It says on the page that the scope of the bot has to be within reason of what someone would bill $5000 for normally.

by tjbiddle 9y ago

PascLeRasc 9y ago
But are slackbots actually made/sold and billed for amounts like that?
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Depending on what else the Slack bot does, it could be just a few hundred lines, in addition to a premade Slack bot framework to streamline the API calls. I was on a team that built a Slack bot in Powershell - she announced the number of incident tickets from each team's Zendesk queue, in the respective team's Slack channel. This helped drive awareness and SLAs. Leveraging our team's in-house Powershell modules for Slack, Zendesk, and other internal Powershell tools meant the bot was only several hundred lines - not much more than a foreach with a config file.
- iamjaredwalters 9y ago
  Very simple equation my friend: hours spent making the bot * hourly rate. The total depends entirely on the complexity of the request.
  - krick 9y ago
    It's not even remotely a good answer. You may charge $200/hour and take a week to build simple HTML/JS web-page (portfolio/landing sort of thing, for example). Good for you, but no way I'm paying you 8000 bucks for something that some school kid can make for me for $20 and an hour. Unless you are a brand and can charge whatever the fuck you like for your work — things typically have a cost. You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well. (And FWIW, I don't know, maybe it's ok kinda price in USA, but to me all this doesn't sound like a $5000 deal.)
    - literallycancer 9y ago
      >You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well. You are thinking that people charge some amount derived from their costs. But it's more like people charge as much as they can (as the market allows) and the actual costs are only important as a lower bound - there is no higher bound.
      - krick 9y ago
        I'm not thinking that, I don't know where you got that impression.
        literallycancer 9y ago
        It seemed like you were enumerating things that would be considered a cost, as if to imply something like "my costs are so and so because I need to afford X and Y, and my rate is based on my costs". Now that I'm reading it again, I guess it's indeed not the most obvious interpretation.
- fragmede 9y ago
  This bot is to be written in Django and Python and run on Heroku which makes it fairly similar to web development with that stack, albiet with a different UI. Google says median web developer salary is $65k/yr or $30/hr, and at $30/hr, $5,000 is 167 hours; or 4.1 weeks (at 40 hrs/wk), or roughly a month; now -> sept 30th, though that is crossed out in the article. So $5,000 is within reason for that skill set, but do slackbots actually involve that much work? If you haven't seen Github's chatops original talk from four years ago it's worth watching, or at least reading the slides, along with Hubot; the product and its features/interface, as well as its code. There's a decent amount of code involved for Hubot, and Github paid for its development (over far longer than 4.1 weeks, mind you). The pay is there and the work is involved enough to take that kind of time, but I can't answer if this particular offer will lead to any work, nor how involved that work would be, so whether it would involve stuffing a few strings into an existing framework, or a whole lot of new development; in turn making it a good or bad deal for the buyer, I also cannot say.

It says on the page that the scope of the bot has to be within reason of what someone would bill $5000 for normally.

PascLeRasc 9y ago

But are slackbots actually made/sold and billed for amounts like that?

stephengillie 9y ago
Depending on what else the Slack bot does, it could be just a few hundred lines, in addition to a premade Slack bot framework to streamline the API calls. I was on a team that built a Slack bot in Powershell - she announced the number of incident tickets from each team's Zendesk queue, in the respective team's Slack channel. This helped drive awareness and SLAs. Leveraging our team's in-house Powershell modules for Slack, Zendesk, and other internal Powershell tools meant the bot was only several hundred lines - not much more than a foreach with a config file.
iamjaredwalters 9y ago
Very simple equation my friend: hours spent making the bot * hourly rate. The total depends entirely on the complexity of the request.
- krick 9y ago
  It's not even remotely a good answer. You may charge $200/hour and take a week to build simple HTML/JS web-page (portfolio/landing sort of thing, for example). Good for you, but no way I'm paying you 8000 bucks for something that some school kid can make for me for $20 and an hour. Unless you are a brand and can charge whatever the fuck you like for your work — things typically have a cost. You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well. (And FWIW, I don't know, maybe it's ok kinda price in USA, but to me all this doesn't sound like a $5000 deal.)
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    >You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well. You are thinking that people charge some amount derived from their costs. But it's more like people charge as much as they can (as the market allows) and the actual costs are only important as a lower bound - there is no higher bound.
    - krick 9y ago
      I'm not thinking that, I don't know where you got that impression.
      - literallycancer 9y ago
        It seemed like you were enumerating things that would be considered a cost, as if to imply something like "my costs are so and so because I need to afford X and Y, and my rate is based on my costs". Now that I'm reading it again, I guess it's indeed not the most obvious interpretation.
fragmede 9y ago
This bot is to be written in Django and Python and run on Heroku which makes it fairly similar to web development with that stack, albiet with a different UI. Google says median web developer salary is $65k/yr or $30/hr, and at $30/hr, $5,000 is 167 hours; or 4.1 weeks (at 40 hrs/wk), or roughly a month; now -> sept 30th, though that is crossed out in the article. So $5,000 is within reason for that skill set, but do slackbots actually involve that much work? If you haven't seen Github's chatops original talk from four years ago it's worth watching, or at least reading the slides, along with Hubot; the product and its features/interface, as well as its code. There's a decent amount of code involved for Hubot, and Github paid for its development (over far longer than 4.1 weeks, mind you). The pay is there and the work is involved enough to take that kind of time, but I can't answer if this particular offer will lead to any work, nor how involved that work would be, so whether it would involve stuffing a few strings into an existing framework, or a whole lot of new development; in turn making it a good or bad deal for the buyer, I also cannot say.