alt Hacker NewsI charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)
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Hey I wrote that :)
I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.
For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work, interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked and the page is still up!
Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and mothers.
IIUC, if that company had just let him be remote, and not demanded exclusivity, they could've gotten the same output, delivered at the same time, for less than 1/10th the cost.
One of the 'mistakes' (conscious at the time) I made when doing technical consulting remotely was only billing for productive, focused hours when I'd be actively typing and mousing on the problem.
Someone suggested that, if I wanted to go for a walk to think about a problem (which is something I did), I should bill that. I decided that was a slippery slope.
Had I been working on-site, which consumed all my time without flexibility, then I'd bill for every hour on-site, and maybe for travel time.
But since we were doing remote (this was before Covid), with hours that I set -- and my clients were serious people, working on serious stuff -- I wanted to be serious too.
The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.
My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.
Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.
Over the summer, the "friend of a friend" the bosses hired to run the website had up and fscked off (and not answering calls), and the rented VPSes had expired. Since I was the only person there (of a dozen or so in an e-waste recycling company) who did websites once upon a time, they said that if I could get a website for the company up, they'd give me $200. I threw a plain HTML page together in 15 minutes (mostly copy-pasted from the old site on Internet Archive), then spent about 45 minutes to figure out how Github Pages works with custom domains. I don't think I've ever gone from nothing to deployed website in an hour before!
As a freelancer I regularly got 5-figure checks without any hassle, it was the $600, $700, $800 checks that I had to fight people about.
I have a similar, but in one way even more insane story, although I was paid more of an employee than a consultant hourly rate. I worked at a big critical infrastructure type company for a good two months and I was supposed to work on-site on intranet-only software. The thing was, the rest of the people in the department were working from home three days a week, I couldn't be "unsupervised" in the building, and it took them almost a whole months to set me up with a VPN. Since my app had to integrate with half a dozen different internal systems, none of which had API specs let alone mock servers, the only thing I could really do from home was was write CSS on mock HTML files. That, combined with waiting like two weeks to get a Visual Studio license approved, meant I spent more than half of my time there at home, doing absolutely no work. The manager fully knew that and I still got paid tho.
The title is kind of misleading, no? The author charged $18k for a "7 weeks adventure where I enjoyed free lunches, drove 50 miles everyday, and dug through emails." Which seems like a pretty appropriate price to buy two months of life.
The static HTML page is ancillary.
Company I worked for wanted a new public website. In the end they paid over 3 million for a Drupal theme. Impressive waste of time and money.
The fixed price wariness tonyedgecombe mentions is real. Early in my career I'd quote hourly because it felt "fair" - but what I learned is that clients who want fixed pricing often have way more context than you do about the problem's difficulty.
Flipped it around now. If a client is eager for fixed pricing on something that seems simple, I dig deeper. Usually there's a reason three other contractors already passed on it.
The psychological bit about being embarrassed to invoice is spot on though. Took me years to stop treating invoices like I was asking for a favour. The framing shift that helped: you're not asking for money, you're confirming a transaction that was already agreed.
You have to understand that these large corpos move like whales, and the money you quoted is a rounding error. I´ve seen a company department burn cash it was asigned on purpose so it wouldn´t go back to finance (indicating that the department isnt using all their money and something is wrong).
Sometimes the money is mindboggling.
I was invited to a meeting with a group of investors to provide feedback on a tech project.
Afterwards, two of them and I went to a nearby hotel for a sandwich and a soft drink to discuss the project. The bill for three sandwiches and some drinks was £125. They didn't even blink.
For me, that was the price of a month of groceries at the time.
I've come to believe that the software industry is the least meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The rest does not matter AT ALL.
The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.
The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask question; like the author of this article described so this made it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.
I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was using their microwave (a popular brand) and it was the most awful UX I had ever seen on a microwave. I literally could not imagine a worse UX if I tried. You couldn't just pin-in the seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my industry sucks... This is the worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to others about how to do good UX..." This isn't just an outlier 'microwave industry' thing though; this dynamic is present everywhere in the whole tech industry; this was just a particularly striking example.
During the dot com boom I bought my first car by doing a weekend of overtime at my day job, on an emergency project. They asked me how much it would take for me to work the weekend, I said the number that was the price of a car, my boss said OK.
(it was a classic 1972 FIAT 500L, it was ~£3200 at the time IIRC)
Our combined careers of moving bits around where we have amassed trillions in developer pay for code that doesn't do anything previously built software could... or worse has made the world a horrible place... Is the bigger story.
Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).
I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?
TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.
I used to do a lot of fixed price contract work. I used to rationalize that I owned the IP and I was my own boss.
These days I just charge an hourly rate. It's so much easier. Just turn up, do the work, go home. If the requirements change or I have to wait for an asset, no problem, I'm getting paid.
I used to work as a freelancer back in the days. I worked a lot for a customer became a good friend. At first I'd work on his projects, but this ultimately shifted to a model where I'd work on projects for his clients, I would bill him, and he would add his margin and bill the end-customer. It worked out great this way.
One day I got a call from him saying that our 'mutual' customer had an urgency job. They were supposed to do a national roll-out of a new payment system, but seemed to have forgotten about a bunch of legacy PoS systems that were still operational and couldn't easily be replaced. Because I was seemingly the only one that was still familiar with this particular system (I worked on it once in the past), the end-customer approached my friend whether I would be available to do this quick. This was in late November, and the rollout was planned for Januari. Because this end-customer is a government org, I realised we'd be guaranteed they wouldn't be working during the holidays (which, in my country is typically 2 weeks for Christmas and new-year's), so really we had only 10 days or so to get it done in time for their team to test it before they holiday shutdown.
I didn't feel like doing such a complex job on such tight deadline. So, I quoted a much higher rate than normal. I also quoted for a multitude of hours that I thought was required, due to the typical overhead that this large end-customer would surely incur. Finally I also added a retainer fee, because I knew that if problems would occur (likely on the last day before the rollout), I'd have to drop anything I was doing and work for them.
I got the job.
I worked feverishly to meet the deadline. I cancelled commitments on other projects, paid an extortionate amount for testing hardware and overnight delivered to my office, bought very expensive testing gear, signed all the NDA's required to work on PoS card payment interfaces, etc. I then worked basically round the clock for 10 days straight to get it done. I did get it done in time, submitted the code to the repository and fired an email to the team-manager that it was in fact done a day early. ...I was greeted with an auto-reply the manager would be on holiday till mid-January, which was the week that entire new payment system had to be rolled out nation-wide.
I wasn't feeling great about it, but my friend urged me to send the invoice for the work I had done, and also the retainer for the rest of December and January. This would allow the customer to write of the expenses in the current calendar-year. I sent the invoice, it was the most amount of money I'd ever invoiced, and I'd normally invoiced per month, this was for a mere 10 days.
December passed, no response from the supposed review team. I stayed on stand-by, declined any other work, stayed sober during the various new-year's office parties, always brought my laptop along, etc.
January came and went. Still no response from the code review team. The new payment system was due to be rolled out mid-january, but nothing had happened. The company had done extensive ad-campaigns beforehand announcing the new payment convenience for their end-users, so the only 'feedback' I saw were frustrated users on Twitter. I still felt bad about charging for the retainer.
This kept going. At some point I did stop sending invoices for the retainer. My friend always paid me in advance (the end-customer was notoriously slow to pay, though did always pay in the end), and I didn't want to cause him too much exposure.
To my knowledge, the software I wrote was never used in the end. To the public it was stated that the PoS systems were simply too old to be upgraded (not true, obv) and that they'd replace them 'soon'. It is now 4 or 5 years laters, the old PoS terminals are still there, sans the functionality I added.
By pure coincidence, years after the job I found out that an old friend of mine, who was also a freelancer at the time, was tasked around that same time by the same customer to do a code-review of a supposed PoS system upgrade. Without realising, he reviewed my code! He was under the same time pressure, and did the code review during Christmas to deliver the results on time before the national rollout in mid-January. He also charged a huge amount of money for it, was also paid, and also never heard about it again. At least he said he remembered being impressed by the quality of the code, and didn't find any defects. So that's about the best outcome of the project I guess.
My takeaway from this: If you are a freelancer, and a large customer wants something done in a hurry, charge more than you ever dared, don't feel bad about it. You'll find that suddenly there isn't as much of a deadline anymore. If the customer declines due to the price, you should be happy for dodging a bullet.
Value your time, or others won't.
The critical phrase is "that sponsored page"; almost certainly the hiring company was doing the page cost plus, so the more they paid, the more they got.
Stories like this are only happening to "one guy I know", it's not something that will every happen to any of us
the longest case I know is a guy in big crypto who after a fallout was taking care of a zombie company for about a year and half, full pay, practically 1 or 2 hours of work some of the weeks
Although not as drastic, I had a similar experience when I was consulting. The inefficiency is staggering!
That's nothing compared to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
(2019)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
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More contributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
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I hate humblebrag posts and hide them, but this was a good read. It's funny and I can relate.
It's interesting that Claude could do this in about 10 minutes.
As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I understood this more when I was on the other side.
This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars – rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time back.
It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot), but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying you.
For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is much more important than saving costs.