To quote one, "I'll bung you £100 to do it".
Thanks, I get paid that a day.
That was my lesson. I don't make websites anymore for people without charging thousands of dollars and an hourly fee for any future work.
I wouldn't be surprised if most developers actually did their first project for nothing at all, I think we all under value our skills to start with and it takes time to realise how much our skills are worth.
That's what I find funny when you put a "real" bill into do a site and you see the owners face, if their initial reaction is, "how much??!", I know it's time to go quoting for a different project.
I don't know what it is with jobs where it is more of a service than labour but I feel we all get a bum rap, it's the same with SEO, I think people think it hardly takes any time at all. If I asked my friend, who is a joiner, to do some work for me, I can see the work being done and I can appreciate the time and effort gone into it, it's almost like people cannot appreciate the time projects take us.
Don't get me wrong, I have put sites together in 16 hours from scratch but they are basic sites and I don't want to maintain them. They have been favour jobs or such like, it's not how I plan spending the rest of my life.
I think the one thing I take from this story is that all people think their idea is unique or will always work. 99% of the time, the people have done no research into competition or if they have they have not evaluated the competition well enough. It's good when you do get a good idea but this does again come down to the execution, you have to be able to rely on your partner to do their fair share.
To give me a real kick, I actually found out when the other company rang me to ask for DNS login details to change the A records, she had not even told me herself I had not got it or given the chance to show designs and a development plan.
It turns out she thought she would be getting a better service and end result as I was charging less when in fact I was doing it as a favour. It goes to show it can work either way!
Problem with being a smallish web development company is that you're either getting the difficult dregs, or you're hoping large multi-disciplinary agencies don't lure away your lucrative gems.
Basically, you either work for free (as a favour to friends or charity) or full charge. No in between.
The power of "free" over "friend's fee" is that they know it's a favour so they can't feel entitled to anything--and if they still do, you may feel entitled to take a dump in their kitchen sink (free of charge).
I'd charge a friend or charity a lower rate that they can afford but strategically set such that their budget (and amount of work they get) seems finite to them. Forces them to come up with their plan and execute, instead of "yeah that's nice, but my friend said THIS would be a better idea...can you just redo the whole thing??" Yes, you can say no, but like I said if there are expectations on either side, it can sour the relationship.