4 ms·

Tale from the other side, I used to run a Linux consultancy and we once had someone engage us to develop a custom Linux distribution. This guy's father was a p

Tale from the other side, I used to run a Linux consultancy and we once had someone engage us to develop a custom Linux distribution. This guy's father was a patent attorney, and after spending significant time developing this distribution for him he couldn't pay because he had spent his budget on patenting it. But he needed some changes beyond the initial scope of work to get it to a viable product, so he was trying to get us to do more work while at the same time not paying his 6 month old invoices. Probably the biggest "nightmare" we had was a local publisher, and this was back in around 2000, who wanted to put their magazines on the web. They were highly targeted "yellow pages" for tourist towns, so they really wanted to take their existing PDF artifacts that they send to the printer and make them available on the web as clickable hyperlinked things inside a web based viewer. So we proposed making a proof of concept, we spent a few weeks working on splitting the multi-page PDF, making a viewer that would pre-cache pages, allow you to zoom and scroll, and defining the bounding boxes for some pages so that you could click and go to the homepage of the advert you were clicking on. We demoed it for them and they liked it, but they said they had decided to put that project on hold. I explicitly asked them if they were happy with what we had built and they said yes. Around a year later I get a series of calls from them and from a new web development shop they have hired, saying that they wanted a refund because the work we did "our new consultant says they could have done in 10 minutes". My feeling from the conversations I had with them at this point was that the new developer was going to get paid out of the money they got back from us. I don't remember what our final resolution was, we always worked very hard to make our clients happy. We really didn't like that they had said they were happy with what we had done, then a year later some third party called us telling us our work was crap and we should give a refund. And the whole "We could have done it in 10 minutes" was not a very good tactic, it just pissed us off.

marpstar 9y ago
I've been on the other side of that argument. In my case, a client had spent $50,000 on a pretty plain static brochure website. They're not tech-savvy, so they wanted to move to a CMS they could manage on their own. When I told them it'd be $2,500 to put their existing site into a new WordPress site, they thought I was joking. That was the day that I realized value pricing is a real thing. In your situation (with money already in hand), I probably would've just told them "Then pay them 0.25 my hourly rate to cover their 10 minutes of work with a 50% bonus. Why are you wasting your time calling me?"
- ewams 9y ago
  u "Should be able to do all this for about $2,500" dem "really? You must be joking" u "hehe, yea I have a funny sense of humor. I meant $25 thousand, not 25 hundred, har har" dem "oh ok, heres your money" u "thank you"
  - ewams 9y ago
    Just so you know I was being serious.
    - randomname11235 9y ago
      Out of the same league, where "If it costs nothing, it can not be worth much": Me working for a large multinational: I would like to support this OpenSource project that we regularly use, can we donate some money? Boss: OpenSource? NO WAY. We're not commies. Me: I would like to buy 100 CD's with software to distribute among my colleagues since it will give them the change to learn about some really cool security tools, all installed on a bootable linux live CD. Boss: 10k Only? GO FOR IT! That same night, we spend burning 100 CD's and printing 100 labels. And that, dear readers, was a (really small) push into the development of Auditor, the Linux Penetration Testing Distro. we all learned to love (Hi Max!).

marpstar 9y ago

I've been on the other side of that argument. In my case, a client had spent $50,000 on a pretty plain static brochure website. They're not tech-savvy, so they wanted to move to a CMS they could manage on their own. When I told them it'd be $2,500 to put their existing site into a new WordPress site, they thought I was joking. That was the day that I realized value pricing is a real thing. In your situation (with money already in hand), I probably would've just told them "Then pay them 0.25 my hourly rate to cover their 10 minutes of work with a 50% bonus. Why are you wasting your time calling me?"

ewams 9y ago
u "Should be able to do all this for about $2,500" dem "really? You must be joking" u "hehe, yea I have a funny sense of humor. I meant $25 thousand, not 25 hundred, har har" dem "oh ok, heres your money" u "thank you"
- ewams 9y ago
  Just so you know I was being serious.
  - randomname11235 9y ago
    Out of the same league, where "If it costs nothing, it can not be worth much": Me working for a large multinational: I would like to support this OpenSource project that we regularly use, can we donate some money? Boss: OpenSource? NO WAY. We're not commies. Me: I would like to buy 100 CD's with software to distribute among my colleagues since it will give them the change to learn about some really cool security tools, all installed on a bootable linux live CD. Boss: 10k Only? GO FOR IT! That same night, we spend burning 100 CD's and printing 100 labels. And that, dear readers, was a (really small) push into the development of Auditor, the Linux Penetration Testing Distro. we all learned to love (Hi Max!).