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Exactly. All they wanted was a mobile-first website. Did that really require a $32 million investment? An in-house team could've handled that for less, with

• x0x0 7y ago
  $32m isn't crazy for a redesign of a large ecommerce site. Consider the needs right out of the box: * multi-language and accessible * desktop, tablet, mobile -- doing this well requires pretty good design chops and a lot of testing * handles money and credit cards, so requires PCI compliance -- there's little chance they're going to move to something like Stripe at their scale * probably connects to a godawful homegrown inventory system * very high uptime requirements * integration with their analytics chain, to provide highly complex ad reporting and conversion optimization flows * an administration UI that functions both at the global level and at the store level with complex permissions and reporting given the various management chains involved Considering even a mid-tier dev costs order $200k fully loaded, a small front-end scrum team of 5 front end eng, a designer, and a PM runs you $1.4/year; a backend team of 10 also with a PM runs $2.5m. That's $8m over 2 years for a pretty small team and not super-expensive talent. I'd initially spec the Hertz site as over $20m to build. And that cost could easily rise.
  • Bamafan 7y ago
    All that. I've told people who scoff at $32 million "for a website" that $32 million might actually be low, depending on requirements.