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Comment by giaour | Hacker News Reader

$50/hour seems really low. It makes me think that the elves are inexperienced or that this is just a thin wrapper around Mechanical Turk or oDesk.

EDIT: This was not meant to be a criticism of whoever built this, but a bit of marketing advice.

As someone who might use a service like this, I would pause before using short-term contract programmers that cost $50 an hour. Consultancies bill out fresh grads at rates considerably higher than that, and if there's any slack time at all between tasks then the elves are being billed out at less than $50/hour. That rate seems more suspiciously cheap than like a good deal.

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Seems solid to me.

At the start the founders will fill the requests, and slowly onboard staff. While the founders are filling the requests they're possibly running at a "loss" from opportunity cost, but I can easily see them being willing to do that.

Wrapping odesk or MTurk is the last thing they'd want to do. It kills the edge they have, of zero project management overhead.

Or maybe their edge is that they talk to the customer and then subcontract the task out on oDesk or MTurk?

Zero project overhead is a more plausible justification for their pricing than zero project management overhead.

Yeah, I do a fair amount of small Python gigs in my free time and $50 seems a bit low to me as well. Just talked to a head hunter the other week, and was told their Python devs are commanding much more than $50/hr. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the curtains here as well.

Not just that it's low, it's also a fact that little jobs have more uncovered overhead. It's a new domain that you have to wrap your head around, etc. No body knows right off the top of their head to get everything done. I don't see the pricing as viable.

Could be viable if you don't live in a first world country I think.

At 50 dollars your actual earnings will probably be 1/2 to 1/3 of that. So yes I guess you can make a living in the third world at 25/hr or 16/hr.

Assuming the workers are employed full-time, $25/h is about $4000/month. That's a pretty good salary for an average programmer in Portugal (Europe!), even before taxes.

Yeah, that was my first guess, that the creators aren't in the US, and $50/hr is a good rate for a lot of developers that live in areas with a lower cost of living, etc.

What about payroll taxes? In most places, your employer pays additional tax on top of your pre-tax salary.

Apart from the withholding of income tax (which I was already counting), I think they only pay social security (23.75%).

Considering that many professional programmers with a college degree in Software Engineering make ~$1300/m (net), the remaining $2700 is plenty to cover all taxes and expenses for both parties.

How much is "much more than $50/hr"?

Your marketing advice is sound.

On the other hand, these elves are getting paid $50/hour while they do market research and get free product ideas. I'm guessing the only reason they charge is because no one would trust a free service.

Damn, I just wish I had built this first. Well done.

Interesting. I've just converted it back to a salary figure for the UK. As a salary that works out at £58,000 - which is considerably higher than the average salary in this part of the UK.

However, given in practice it's essentially contract work it's about 30% less than average contracting rates.

If they manage to get paid work equivalent to working full time though, they'll be earning a fair whack more than me, so good on them.

Whether it seems reasonable or trustable probably depends an awful lot on where you are based.

What do you think is a fair market rate? Are there sites that offer higher rates than this for the contractors for short term gigs? It kind of interests me there if there are opportunities for doing short half day scope projects.

I dunno, my first programming job was for a consultancy that billed me out at $125/hour to do small jobs. Somewhere in the $80-$150 range? Maybe more, since their examples highlight jobs that take as little as half an hour.

I think you're assuming that the people completing the tasks are receiving the full $50/hour, which would mean no managers, no salespeople, no accounts receivable staff, and no office.

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