> paying for the QR menus on top of printed menus can be costly — especially if customers aren't using them.
I mean, hosting a low-volume static website and printing out a URL as a QR code are nearly free. So many tech businesses take advantage of restaurant owners (and restaurants are already an extremely low margin business) solely because most restauranteurs are not tech savvy.
Printing menus costs a few cents, laminating them a bit more. That's a tough price to beat.
The level of "create a static online version of my menu" is something ChatGPT could actually do quite easily.
Dodgy QR code sites are surprisingly common (pro tip: convert it back to text, and see if they are bouncing through a server so they can later charge you to prevent the code from “expiring”).
S3 sync + https lambda + cdn is a shockingly huge pain in the ass to setup, but once it is done, you just “s3 sync” the directory with the pdf you printed.
I agree with your general point though. That corner of the industry is full of predatory service providers.
$13,000 dollars + monthly hosting charges.
There's a lot of overhead with small clients. They don't have an internal employee who makes and sends the copy and the content. You really build everything from the ground up. You also have to host it and keep it online. There's only you; you're the whole IT department.
Also I made 50 an hour a decade ago as a student. It's a low income for a freelance professional with unsteady work.
Realistically, it's closer to a month of full time work, but it's spread over 3-6 months of talking, meeting, getting feedback, waiting for images etc.
It was one of my favourite jobs because I could apply tech to solve smaller, tangible problems. It was also the hardest to live from.
1. $100 per hour min for anyone good. Possibly more if in a high-cost labor market and/or working with certain agencies (mostly boutique). So that’s 130 hours right there.
2. No discussion of interaction with customer. That could be many, many hours depending on the customer and project specs.
3. The 130 hours for design and coding are way, way over actual time required unless the specs are highly stylized. My guess for each would be 4-20 hours, depending on complexity.
4. Depending on the site, copywriting and SEO might be a bigger labor/money sink than the design and coding.
All that said, there are many agencies who can make good, basic static websites for $5-7k plus hosting. The catch is knowing which ones are good.
Another possible issue, depending on the agency, is what is the smallest account that they will do business with. $13k may have been the agency’s minimum.
At this point it is really just a type of business tax and anti-progress. Paying 13k for a geocities site is increasing the probability the business fails.
I just can't imagine anyone paying that by 2030. Midjourney can already do the most amazing design work but it is stuck at the conceptual level. It won't be stuck at that stage for ever.
I could see it costing this much if there was extensive copywriting needs, detailed SEO needs, super-high performance requirements, and/or highly-stylized design.
Otherwise, that’s way overpriced.