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Comment by cjbarber | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this looks pretty awesome if they are able to uphold the talent bar.

Would be good to get more info of how much you can make as a developer and how much projects are likely to cost, though.

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Agreed, I hate sites that provide no information on relative pricing. I’d love a formula for weekly costs and a low-level guestimate tool for project size/scope/cost… before having to fill out any form info.

We actually do not make you fill out any forms is the great thing and we do have an engine that figures out a pretty detailed cost within minutes of chatting with you. Sorry if this isn't clear! What might you be looking to build?

No offense, I have to start with a form and provide you my email address to go through that process. It may be super simple - but I was talking more of a calculator style solution that didn’t require giving you a way to spam me forever.

Twist ending - Selling mailing lists is the actual business.

Hi! A good developer can expect to make $10K - $20K per month on Gigster :) The developer also can expect to do no sales or management work on the project. You just write code on interesting projects and get paid :) Much like Uber hands drivers rides and they just have to accept them.

> Much like Uber hands drivers rides and they just have to accept them.

So much like Uber, can we assume that "$10-$20k/month" is a mythical number[0] that could only be achieved by working 100+ hours per week and virtually no developers will actually make that much?

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/10/uber...

I believe theres no bidding, so gigster only accepts gigs that can pay the dev reasonably. Correct me if i'm wrong.

This is correct. We price out the gigs ahead of time and match them with developers who like the price.

Sounds like this will have a perpetual race to the bottom as inevitably there'll be developers asking high prices and not being paired with the work, and those asking less with more pairings.

How do you handle a situation where you estimate a given price and don't have any developers willing to complete that project at the given price?

I have a hard time believing this estimate. What are you basing that figure off of? That's senior-level software engineer money for freelancers who are mainly students trying to "earn some beer money" and programmers at Google wanting some extra projects.

Holy moly, so many warnings signs and red flags reading the comments so far.

$20k/month is $240k/year, which is some serious money. Forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of these numbers.

Hold on, are we talking employee or contractor? If it's the latter, I'd consider at least the following two points:

1. $20k/month every month? Unlikely.

2. Self-employment taxes + other business expenses.

edit: formatting

Does it matter for the context of my post? $240k is a hefty income either way for a freelancer who needn't live in an expensive metropolitan area. And it seems you agree with me either way with the way you ended your first bullet point.

A lot of startups in the sharing economy space have been guilty of grossly exaggerating how much their contractors/employees actually make. Is this just yet another instance of that or are these numbers legitimate? I think that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

Sorry if I wasn't clear... I do agree with you - if anything I'm more skeptical :)

So, you said elsewhere "Generally you can expect a Gigster project to be way cheaper (we've seen 10X in some cases) ", and yet your devs are making 10-20k? That does not add up.

I really hope this is true, and if it is then I guess it's time to quit my job :D

can you give a breakdown on how the business model is sustainable? No real data but x number of projects, y number of staff, with total revenue of N and profit of M.

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