And as a bonus, you get to be on the hook for maintaining that site until the owner gets bored with it, making whatever changes they want (for free).
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.
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.
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.