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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

> Agencies of one say things like:

    Get unlimited requests and revisions, source files included, for $2,499/m.

Okay, you can say that, but how does a single person satisfy "unlimited" requests and revisions? Sounds like a recipe for rapid burnout and dissatisfied customers, to me.

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> Is it really unlimited requests?

> Yes! Once subscribed, you're able to add as many design requests to your queue as you'd like, and they will delivered one by one.

You can make as many requests as you want, but it doesn't seem like he makes any guarantee as to how fast he'll get to them.

> Because each and every request is different, it's hard to guarantee anything here but my general rule of thumb for a typical request is two business days.

- https://intercom.help/designjoy/en/articles/5509274-how-fast...

His offer seems like those 19,99$ /month discount gyms that are open 24/7. you can access them all the time but have no guarantee to complete your workout in 1hr due to the large amount of people. Not sure if that works for deadline driven businesses.

Personally, I wouldn't frame things this way, but one way to manage that sustainably is to observe that you can offer limited requests without promising any particular response time.

As the number of requests increases, the latency of a response will go up. If a client needs a response in order to evaluate it for the next request, this will naturally lower the total number of requests. Also, clients will at some point realize they get where they want faster (i.e. overall throughput) if they are more parsimonious with their requests.

In practice, healthy relationships and good faith clients and agents are probably sufficient for this to work out.

I would not use the term "unlimited" but, depending upon the nature of the work, it can be perfectly reasonable to have a subscription without an explicit cap. When I was an industry analyst at a very small firm we worked on that basis (with adders for certain discrete projects--consulting days, posting rights for research, etc.). It was never a problem. Frankly, getting big companies to get their acts together enough to actually do inquiries and things like that so they got value from us was a bigger issue than them being a constant time suck.

The same way Verizon promises unlimited data. Most customers don't maximize usage and in the fine print there is probably some hard limit or exceptions for what they feel is abuse.

They can always rate limit by taking a day or two to respond to each email or revision request. That creates a limit of perhaps 20 interactions a month.

In the same way a buffet satisfies “unlimited” fill-ups.

The way many handle this is you get X requests a day for new things, revisions, etc.

Don't call that unlimited. It's limited.

I've never seen claims like that without asterisks and small print saying "up to a reasonable amount" where "reasonable" is completely undefined.

If big corps can call limited things unlimited, why now "agencies of one"?

I mean, it is unlimited, within a reasonable use, and the agency is the one to define what is reasonable use and what is not.

It's dishonest. Don't be dishonest just because you saw somebody else do it first.

Unless it's illegal, the incentives probably force you to do such things if you want to be competitive. Free markets suck for such things.

My personal integrity is a higher bar than mere legality. I realize that I may be in a minority with that attitude in startup culture.

Big corps are better at fielding lawsuits, it turns out.

Agreed it sounds more like 30 updates per month :)

You can outsource all of the work to Ukraine or India.

I've worked with several highly competent Ukranian devs, but I think most of them have other things on their mind right now.

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