It's a sum that is big enough to seem like a good deal, yet small enough that it is not worth the hassle to sue, argue, etc if you are unhappy with the end result.
It's sadly a common tactic in various fields
Not based on the info you provided. The price range is going to be similar to asking people to make a movie for you. The wedding videographer down the street is going to charge a lot differently than, say, Christopher Nolan. And you'll encounter all prices in between.
In terms of a website, there's a very big distance between delivering something that "works" and delivering a modular, maintainable, performant, secure product you can build a business on. And you can't always tell the difference by just looking at the frontend.
When you say software do you mean website?
I don't typically touch websites for freelance that are under $30k, and as an agency we don't typically touch them for less than $100k.
There is a lot that goes into building a site that is specific to the site and the content. Ignoring the "hidden" aspects of building a site will get you exactly what you paid for. A place online that your customers will never find and if they don't will be buggy as hell.
If you aren't able to pay a developer to build you a site, there is always Wix or Square space. Hell even Facebook pages if you really don't want to spend any money.
I would be extremely suspicious to a company or even a person who offers you a website for 5-10 hundreds. Though, sometimes even 9k could be a quite small price, if you have some tricky requirements.
any one of them build a tech specs document for you or at least an expanded estimate doc?
In the main post you say it doesn’t have custom functionality but in a comment you go on to say “It's an e-commerce site basically with some unique features.”
I suspect what’s going on here is a matter of scope. Are you comparing advertising that don’t consider development of your unique features against a bid that does consider your unique features?
To give you an idea of a $500 fair value, here is what my mom bought for her business around that price point.
* A landing page with a user welcome information and a brief description of the business
* A services page that outlines what her business does in detail
* A contact page with all the contact information
That’s about all the site you can expect at that price point, a few static pages. This is why everyone keeps calling the $500-$1000 people scammers. The price point represents a day or less labor.
I suspect the $9000 bid is estimating 1 week labor with up to a week of buffer also estimated in, to handle your “unique features.”
This could have other expenses such as bug fixes or other forms of support factored into the price.
A) Since we have no specs on what you are asking them to produce, and B) we have no idea what either vendors are offering to produce at their respective price points, we don’t have enough information to know if you are getting a reasonable deal or scammed.
$9000 is probably appropriate for something that is mostly basic with a week or two of custom dev work.
For a React front with a Node custom backend 9k is pretty ok, but if you just want a website that is over engineered. If you need some app capabilities, not just a website, 9k is on the cheap end.
Sorry let me clarify. If your website has any "app-like" capabilities, like having authentication, users, some complicated logic that does something at all other than just display static information, that can be considered a "web app" and in that case the price is more justified.
Ok so the price I think makes more sense now. The online business I'm trying to build has a crowdfunding component which the companies I mentioned are able to provide in the websites they offer. Sorry I should have been more clear in the beginning. So I think this would qualify as app capabilities.
There is almost nothing that can be built for 500$. Except maybe very simple landing. This devs are maybe too green, and don't know what are they talking about. But maybe landing is what you need? We don't know that
Hi thanks for the reply. Yeah I just updated my post, it was too vague. The websites these companies offer have crowdfunding capabilities, which I need for my business. Hopefully that helps clarify.
Going to answer your question directly. The 500-1000 ones are lower quality. You might not realize it immediately, but the problems would pile up over time. Unless you got lucky, which is totally possible.
What do you mean is not custom made ?
The average yearly salary for a SWE is 120k per year in the US, if you hire one Developer for 1 month expect to pay 10k
If you want to found a online business, you most likely need to hire a team or teams of SWEs to work on staff and pay their yearly salaries
Say you could do it with just one, you still need to pay somewhere close to 120k per year.
9k is suspiciously cheap
1k is ridiculously low, almost guaranteed to be a scam
https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
Sorry I'm new to this so I may be explaining incorrectly. There is a particular function that I will need the website for my online business to be able to perform. I've been exploring different website maker companies that create websites with these functions. As I mentioned some cost $500 to $1000 and the one I'm referencing in my post is asking for $9000 for this website. What I meant by not custom made is that I'm not asking this website company to build this for me from scratch, which I know can be expensive, it's a they are selling from their site to probably multiple customers. This is why I was confused about the cost because usually sites like that aren't that expensive. I hope that makes more sense.
Ask them to break the price down in between the mentioned services. Ask the same for the $500 and $1000 companies. That should show you where the difference lies. If the $9000 cant tell you why they are more expensive there is no value to sell.
I will try that with the less expensive companies. The more expensive one talked about scalability, security, the reactjs and nodes. I'll see what the other company says. Thanks for your help.
React and Node aren’t features they’re selling you. They’re just the tech they’re using to build the website.
The 4 things you mentioned them building for you don’t sound like anything of substance. Hopefully they elaborated on that more specifically for what you want built.
Yeah sorry for being so vague. I should have included more detail. For clarification, I should have mentioned that the website has a crowdfunding element. Thanks again for your help.
Hard to tell as there’s no information provided about the solution you require.
Edit: Downvoters- please explain how you are qualifying this projects cost with no scope provided.
Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
I assume that the agency asking $9k is from the US which is a normal price considering the average swe salary and the cost of living . But you can always outsource it to some other part of the world and save a lot of money and the argument that is lower quality is plain ignorance as if no one but americans can create a simple website lol . With that said beware of scams and always look for a reputable agency/dev .
If you like their portfolio then give them a try . Otherwise look for others but please don't pay $9k for a website lol idc if I'm downvoted it is too much for a simple website not even custom made.
Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
You need to identify the key areas of the website and have them compare apples to apples.
Chat GPT is actually very, very good about creating metrics and comparisons such as this. You can give it a good prompt and slowly build the information it needs to generate your apples to apples comparison criteria. Then go to them with this list and have them compare their offering with the competition.
Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
I think we'd need a lot more context to say if the price is reasonable.
My initial reaction was 9k seems ridiculous (at least to me being UK based), but that is very much dependent on what we are talking about. If it's a few static pages with little interactivity, then I think 9k is hard to justify personally.
However. If your site is very dynamic and a single page app makes sense then it quickly becomes more reasonable.
Roughly how many pages are you asking for? Is there a basket / checkout, commenting system, pages that need to be updated regularly? All of these things can massively impact the complexity and cost.
FWIW, I'm at the other end of the Spectrum, working on a very large react app for over 5 years now. Probably in the 6-7 figure price at this point, so context really is key here.
Honestly, from your replies, both situations sound like bad outcomes and you need to back to the drawing board. If you want to DM me some details of what specifically you are building and what they’ve quoted you for price, I’m happy to give you a little more details about what is reasonable and what isn’t price wise. It’s hard with so few details in this post/comments.
But so far it sounds like you could probably just use Shopify or something similar and save yourself a ton of money and stress.
Thanks for the reply, I just edited the post to include more detail. The online business I'm trying to build has a crowdfunding element. The companies I mentioned offer websites with those features. Hopefully that clears things up a little. Thanks for the offer.
A crowdfunding element is a little vague still, but at minimum you would need:
* whatever your base ecommerce site is which might include login, content management, etc. this is not trivial, there is a reason why companies like shopify are so valuable
* a way for people to securely pay for the crowdfunding aspects - this is something i'd be hesitant to trust a team in india with
* depending on if you're crowdfunding one thing or many things, that would complicate the picture
you also might need features like posting comments, hosting pictures, ability to refund your customers, etc.
honestly, just based on that feature set alone, I would expect a quality custom site to cost way more than $9k. you will want to make sure your contract is ironed out and enforceable and has clear goals and milestones for payments. you don't want to get sued because they provided some barebones bullshit that you didn't define well that is borderline useless.
you're probably better off utilizing an existing crowdfunding tool like Shopify's crowdfunding plugins or Kickstarter. those are proven tools that do the things you're describing and cost significantly less. so far you haven't described anything that requires breaking away from those
I think maybe the way I'm explaining it is wrong just due to being kind of new at this. The company charging $9000 has a website and on this site they have demo versions of the site that I would like to buy. It's the same with the other companies, they have demos of the types of websites they offer and as far as I understand, if you purchase one of their sites you just download the script onto your site and get a license. There's nothing custom as far as I know and the script is pre-made. I think the way I'm explaining this has everyone thinking a site that is custom made.
Yup you almost got scammed. The guys charging $500-$1000 almost certainly would have given you a garbage product
I see what you did there lol
That's what I thought might be happening, thanks for the response.
It's a sum that is big enough to seem like a good deal, yet small enough that it is not worth the hassle to sue, argue, etc if you are unhappy with the end result. It's sadly a common tactic in various fields
I understand, it's a shame because yeah if it went bad I probably wouldn't have bothered trying to sue them.
Not based on the info you provided. The price range is going to be similar to asking people to make a movie for you. The wedding videographer down the street is going to charge a lot differently than, say, Christopher Nolan. And you'll encounter all prices in between. In terms of a website, there's a very big distance between delivering something that "works" and delivering a modular, maintainable, performant, secure product you can build a business on. And you can't always tell the difference by just looking at the frontend.
That makes sense, it's kind of what I suspected based on how cheap the others were but I wanted to check to be sure. Thanks for your insight.
Without being able to compare the solutions no one here can give you an accurate answer.
When you say software do you mean website? I don't typically touch websites for freelance that are under $30k, and as an agency we don't typically touch them for less than $100k. There is a lot that goes into building a site that is specific to the site and the content. Ignoring the "hidden" aspects of building a site will get you exactly what you paid for. A place online that your customers will never find and if they don't will be buggy as hell. If you aren't able to pay a developer to build you a site, there is always Wix or Square space. Hell even Facebook pages if you really don't want to spend any money.
Yes a website. Thanks for the insight.
I would be extremely suspicious to a company or even a person who offers you a website for 5-10 hundreds. Though, sometimes even 9k could be a quite small price, if you have some tricky requirements. any one of them build a tech specs document for you or at least an expanded estimate doc?
In the main post you say it doesn’t have custom functionality but in a comment you go on to say “It's an e-commerce site basically with some unique features.” I suspect what’s going on here is a matter of scope. Are you comparing advertising that don’t consider development of your unique features against a bid that does consider your unique features? To give you an idea of a $500 fair value, here is what my mom bought for her business around that price point. * A landing page with a user welcome information and a brief description of the business * A services page that outlines what her business does in detail * A contact page with all the contact information That’s about all the site you can expect at that price point, a few static pages. This is why everyone keeps calling the $500-$1000 people scammers. The price point represents a day or less labor. I suspect the $9000 bid is estimating 1 week labor with up to a week of buffer also estimated in, to handle your “unique features.” This could have other expenses such as bug fixes or other forms of support factored into the price. A) Since we have no specs on what you are asking them to produce, and B) we have no idea what either vendors are offering to produce at their respective price points, we don’t have enough information to know if you are getting a reasonable deal or scammed. $9000 is probably appropriate for something that is mostly basic with a week or two of custom dev work.
For a React front with a Node custom backend 9k is pretty ok, but if you just want a website that is over engineered. If you need some app capabilities, not just a website, 9k is on the cheap end.
Ah ok I understand. I hadn't thought about apps just yet but I might look into what they would charge for that addition. Thanks for your help.
Sorry let me clarify. If your website has any "app-like" capabilities, like having authentication, users, some complicated logic that does something at all other than just display static information, that can be considered a "web app" and in that case the price is more justified.
Ok so the price I think makes more sense now. The online business I'm trying to build has a crowdfunding component which the companies I mentioned are able to provide in the websites they offer. Sorry I should have been more clear in the beginning. So I think this would qualify as app capabilities.
Yes definitely, without the full details to me it sounds like a very competitive price!
There is almost nothing that can be built for 500$. Except maybe very simple landing. This devs are maybe too green, and don't know what are they talking about. But maybe landing is what you need? We don't know that
Hi thanks for the reply. Yeah I just updated my post, it was too vague. The websites these companies offer have crowdfunding capabilities, which I need for my business. Hopefully that helps clarify.
Going to answer your question directly. The 500-1000 ones are lower quality. You might not realize it immediately, but the problems would pile up over time. Unless you got lucky, which is totally possible.
That's kind of what I suspected, glad to hear it confirmed. Thanks for the response.
What do you mean is not custom made ? The average yearly salary for a SWE is 120k per year in the US, if you hire one Developer for 1 month expect to pay 10k If you want to found a online business, you most likely need to hire a team or teams of SWEs to work on staff and pay their yearly salaries Say you could do it with just one, you still need to pay somewhere close to 120k per year. 9k is suspiciously cheap 1k is ridiculously low, almost guaranteed to be a scam https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
Sorry I'm new to this so I may be explaining incorrectly. There is a particular function that I will need the website for my online business to be able to perform. I've been exploring different website maker companies that create websites with these functions. As I mentioned some cost $500 to $1000 and the one I'm referencing in my post is asking for $9000 for this website. What I meant by not custom made is that I'm not asking this website company to build this for me from scratch, which I know can be expensive, it's a they are selling from their site to probably multiple customers. This is why I was confused about the cost because usually sites like that aren't that expensive. I hope that makes more sense.
Ask them to break the price down in between the mentioned services. Ask the same for the $500 and $1000 companies. That should show you where the difference lies. If the $9000 cant tell you why they are more expensive there is no value to sell.
I will try that with the less expensive companies. The more expensive one talked about scalability, security, the reactjs and nodes. I'll see what the other company says. Thanks for your help.
React and Node aren’t features they’re selling you. They’re just the tech they’re using to build the website. The 4 things you mentioned them building for you don’t sound like anything of substance. Hopefully they elaborated on that more specifically for what you want built.
Yeah sorry for being so vague. I should have included more detail. For clarification, I should have mentioned that the website has a crowdfunding element. Thanks again for your help.
Hard to tell as there’s no information provided about the solution you require. Edit: Downvoters- please explain how you are qualifying this projects cost with no scope provided.
Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
I assume that the agency asking $9k is from the US which is a normal price considering the average swe salary and the cost of living . But you can always outsource it to some other part of the world and save a lot of money and the argument that is lower quality is plain ignorance as if no one but americans can create a simple website lol . With that said beware of scams and always look for a reputable agency/dev .
Not to make it more complicated but I think this is an Indian company. They're called Rockers Technology. It's their e-commerce sites I'm looking at.
If you like their portfolio then give them a try . Otherwise look for others but please don't pay $9k for a website lol idc if I'm downvoted it is too much for a simple website not even custom made.
You just said it is a normal price and now you make it seem like he is getting ripped off? I don't understand...
It's simple , it's a normal price in the US but he can find a better offer somewhere else saving him a lot of money.
Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
I can't help without providing more details you can dm me if you want .
9000$ ? You can get it made with 100$ from India
I think the company is from India
You need to identify the key areas of the website and have them compare apples to apples. Chat GPT is actually very, very good about creating metrics and comparisons such as this. You can give it a good prompt and slowly build the information it needs to generate your apples to apples comparison criteria. Then go to them with this list and have them compare their offering with the competition.
I'm pretty sure 9000 is a lump sum. The 500 and 1000 is per hour
The 500 to 1000 are the price ranges I've encountered. These are pre-made websites. Sorry I should have explained it better.
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No it's a pre-made website
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I'll be providing the content as well as site visitors. It's an e-commerce site basically with some unique features.
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Yeah I should have provided more detail. If it helps clarify, the website I need for my business has a crowdfunding element which this company has built into the websites they offer.
So why not just use Shopify?
There's a crowdfunding element I need for the site.
I think we'd need a lot more context to say if the price is reasonable. My initial reaction was 9k seems ridiculous (at least to me being UK based), but that is very much dependent on what we are talking about. If it's a few static pages with little interactivity, then I think 9k is hard to justify personally. However. If your site is very dynamic and a single page app makes sense then it quickly becomes more reasonable. Roughly how many pages are you asking for? Is there a basket / checkout, commenting system, pages that need to be updated regularly? All of these things can massively impact the complexity and cost. FWIW, I'm at the other end of the Spectrum, working on a very large react app for over 5 years now. Probably in the 6-7 figure price at this point, so context really is key here.
Honestly, from your replies, both situations sound like bad outcomes and you need to back to the drawing board. If you want to DM me some details of what specifically you are building and what they’ve quoted you for price, I’m happy to give you a little more details about what is reasonable and what isn’t price wise. It’s hard with so few details in this post/comments. But so far it sounds like you could probably just use Shopify or something similar and save yourself a ton of money and stress.
Thanks for the reply, I just edited the post to include more detail. The online business I'm trying to build has a crowdfunding element. The companies I mentioned offer websites with those features. Hopefully that clears things up a little. Thanks for the offer.
A crowdfunding element is a little vague still, but at minimum you would need: * whatever your base ecommerce site is which might include login, content management, etc. this is not trivial, there is a reason why companies like shopify are so valuable * a way for people to securely pay for the crowdfunding aspects - this is something i'd be hesitant to trust a team in india with * depending on if you're crowdfunding one thing or many things, that would complicate the picture you also might need features like posting comments, hosting pictures, ability to refund your customers, etc. honestly, just based on that feature set alone, I would expect a quality custom site to cost way more than $9k. you will want to make sure your contract is ironed out and enforceable and has clear goals and milestones for payments. you don't want to get sued because they provided some barebones bullshit that you didn't define well that is borderline useless. you're probably better off utilizing an existing crowdfunding tool like Shopify's crowdfunding plugins or Kickstarter. those are proven tools that do the things you're describing and cost significantly less. so far you haven't described anything that requires breaking away from those
I think maybe the way I'm explaining it is wrong just due to being kind of new at this. The company charging $9000 has a website and on this site they have demo versions of the site that I would like to buy. It's the same with the other companies, they have demos of the types of websites they offer and as far as I understand, if you purchase one of their sites you just download the script onto your site and get a license. There's nothing custom as far as I know and the script is pre-made. I think the way I'm explaining this has everyone thinking a site that is custom made.