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Comment by Laurentvw | Hacker News Reader

Just for the sake of giving us more information, would you be willing to compare your RoR app with a website I made a while ago.

I got paid $500 to make http://www.solafcars.com (works in multiple languages, includes an admin panel, everything on the site is editable). I would assume your RoR app was much bigger, but let us know how it compares.

I know I got underpaid though.

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A tip for your future: Price based on value, don't price based on cost.

You are delivering a tool which sells new automobiles. A single sale is worth thousands of dollars to the dealership. If they are achieving ROI on the first sale they make as a result of your website, and you're expecting that to eventually be in the few sales a day range, you are DRASTICALLY underpricing relative to the value they perceive the website as delivering.

Did this take more than 3 hours to make? Did you provide any post-implementation support at all? If either are true, you wildly underbid.

It definitely took more than 3 hours, I'm not superman lol. Everything was made from scratch. The admin panel took most of my time. Keep in mind I also made the design, registered the domain name and set up the hosting. Support was also provided, we got together so I could explain how he could manage the website on his own. It was my first real freelance project though, so I let him choose the price.

Your pricing may be off by as many as two orders of magnitude.

Lol, dude, so you're where the Chinese companies outsource to :).

Joke aside, I suggest using Django in such low budget projects if the admin is a selling point. Will save you some time at least (In Django a very slick admin is automatically there for you). Best of the luck.

This might be the worst example of underpaid I've ever seen.

It seems to me that you got seriously shafted on that deal. I don't think that the app I made was much more complex, i.e. I probably maybe spent 10x as much time as you did on that one, but I made 200x more money doing it. The pricing of these things seems to be very subjective to me, and contingent on numerous factors including: How much they've actually got to pay for it? How much they think they can get away with? How much they think someone else would bill them for it? How much their friends tell them it should cost? What is the actual application? How much incremental money do they stand to make as a result of its existence? And very little with how much time/effort actually goes into it on your part. Ofhand, you could have easily made at least $5k on that site. And if it was for a more general purpose, i.e. as opposed to just one dealership, you could have made much more.

You made a triple-language supported database application with immaculate crisp graphic design and well thought-out layout for $500 dollars??? Your solution btw is about as good as it gets for a small-biz website.

I second the opinion that your pricing is off by one or two orders of magnitude.

Furthermore, I wonder how jobs like this effectively lower the expected cost for other business. When does the owner's brother approach me and ask why he can't have a top-notch custom webapp for $500?

I don't really think it's a big deal doing something on the cheap for a first project, the experienced gained and the reference to show future clients is worth it.

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