I’ll write you a Slack bot in return for a $5K donation to ScriptEd
dopeboy.github.io
dopeboy.github.io
What I’d suggest instead is a clear message of “high quality slack bots for a flat 5000” and a prominent note that all proceeds go to the charity. Maybe you could also mention that when it comes time to pay, you’d like me to pay the charity directly, but you don’t have to lead with this. The charity is the icing on the cake, but you’re building the cake on icing.
It would be an expense and would ergo be 100% tax-deductible (e.g. a reduction on $5000 of taxable income). There is another aspect relating to whether the firm gained an asset but that applies to both scenarios.
This makes no sense as a tax scheme.
Basically, I would recommend focusing on value instead of the charity (despite the fact the charity is the most delightful part -- it's still a price point businesses need to be _sold_ on, not just pitched on).
Would you like him to come up with the idea and market it as well? ;)
* I made the bot for my startup [0]. It supports interactive messages (buttons, dropdowns), slash commands, and @ commands. Put another way, I use (and have knowledge of) pretty much all parts of the Slack API.
* You're getting a backend with the bot. This backend could just save stuff into a database or do more sophisticated things.
* I'm happy to work with the non-profit, ScriptEd, on some content marketing material so that the person or company that sponsors this gets public recognition.
* Timing - I'm doing this in tandem with other things. Obviously depends on what I get but let's say roughly 2 months.
* We're pretty close to getting our startup's app in the app store. I'm happy to help with this process now that I'm more familiar with it.
[0] - http://braidhq.com/
Also, this being (I assume) a weekday daytime commitment, do your volunteers get typically get their teaching time 'donated' by their employers?
Some of the companies our volunteers work for have paid volunteering time included as part of employee benefits - however that amount of time is usually 1 day / month, which is less than the amount of time we ask people to volunteer (2x a week, for 1.5 hours each session). Most commonly, our volunteers employ some flex time and make up the hours they spend with us by either coming in to work earlier, or staying late. It does require manager / company support to get approval to do so, however!
It garnered a few (promises of) donations... I never did follow up to see if the charities I specified had gotten them. But I was young and happy to do the patches anyway, so it felt like a bonus.
Given the choice, I'd prefer this model.
Donation cash is the sweetest thing an NGO can have, and doing development work in exchange for a donation like this seems like a really cool way to raise it.
Also involves the least amount of transparency and not much assurance that the cash is not going directly into the pocket of someone.
Further, why not just charge the $5000 and donate it yourself? Why the gimmick?
https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2015/10/01/the-gradual-dem...
So you donate/pay X, a non-profit organization, then they send the work to one of their contributors to build. This way you don't have the, "I paid so and so, but for something some other person built".
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.
The total depends entirely on the complexity of the request.
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.)
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.
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.
I don't think everyone has to live such a life. It's a great relief to be in an employment without having to think about making money all the time. I chose freelancing because I want to choose what to work on and don't need any security for now, but I can imagine to work for $4,500-5,000/month in the future when I have kids and mortgages to pay for and need security.
The problem I have with freelancing is that you start to measure your life time in your hourly rate, because the time = money equation is ever-present. One has to be mature to resist this temptation, sometimes I'm not able to do it. It's a constant fight between the attitude that money isn't everything and the impression that it actually is.
I'm not expecting to build a greeting bot. I'm not expecting a build a trigger bot. I'm offering to build something much more complex that might have a host of integrations and perform some form of sophisticated logic.
I'm deliberately keeping my scope wide so that I get some creative propositions. But to your point, it needs to be worth $5k and I'm willing to make it so.
Well, what a deal!
If someone is willing to buy that bot, they will be more inclined to pay you to do that since is "charity" than the dev who need food. If you want do donate, it's OK donate as much as you want for anyone, but brag/sell your services for charity just degrades our profession.