Why are clients shocked by the price for web development?
In my experience as a web developer for the past year, it seems that many clients are shocked by the price for a website where they want specific functionality created just for their business. Why is this?
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadDisclaimer: I work for Vistaprint, who also owns Webs, and I always speak only for myself on news.yc, never for my employer.
They usually associate complex work with physical products (laptops, phones, cars .. )
There's a huge cost difference between grabbing a pair of pants at Walmart and having a good tailor craft a pair of nice slacks.
And the difference between the two is glaringly obvious.
No but most of the time, clients compare it to the css theme a 15year old did for their wordpress install.
I've found it's best to let the ones who balk at the true cost walk away. They will go find some cheap service to build what they want ("oh, can you make it like facebook?"). They will spend 3x as much as you quoted by the end of it, but they will learn to pay attention when a developer tells them how much it will cost.
The second project they ask you to work on to fix the disaster of the first will be a lot nicer.
Whatever you do, do NOT underbid, ever. I made that mistake a couple times and it turned into nearly a year of bitter burnout. Hard to like what you do when you are getting paid about 20% of what you should be due to invoice battles.
When someone walks into a $5 million dollar home they instantly know it's an expensive home not because they're aware of the materials and craft that went into building the house. It's because they have a point of reference, their home, for what something costs and they're able to extrapolate an approximate cost for something far more expensive.
People don't have this point of reference for web development because most people haven't ever hired someone to build a web app for them before, and most people have never tried to build a web app on their own.
A tip: Ask people for a few sites that they like and that they use. Take a look at them and approximate how much time it would take you and your team to get that application built from scratch.
Then say - okay to build an approximate version of X, you'd probably be looking at a team of 3-4 people (or 6-8, etc.) working full time for X months.
So that site likely would cost around X dollars for you to build.
The point isn't to get them to understand our craft and the effort involved.
This exercise helps give them a point of reference for how much the things they use every day cost, and from there they can start being realistic about what they can get within their budget.
The average small business needs a website with their hours, phone number, some pictures, and maybe a blog that they'll never actually update, but they don't really know the difference between paying someone to set up wordpress and paying someone to build a bespoke web application.
The only reason the majority of small businesses think they need custom functionality is because they don't know enough to know what they're really trying to do. Try to listen to what the client wants to accomplish, not how they want to accomplish it, and see if you can come up with an off the shelf solution to their problems (or refer them to someone else who can).
Think about all those times someone on stackoverflow asks how to do something in a really roundabout way that seems wrong. The first question you ask is "what are you trying to accomplish?" Most of the time there is a simpler way to do it.
Edit:
[1] When I say wordpress, I mean wordpress/drupal/cushycms not just wordpress. Basically anything where you're not charging the client to build a custom blog/CMS engine, or charging $2k for a custom design.
I want to punch all developers in the mouth who think a custom application for this type of situation is a good idea. They give us all a bad name and exacerbate the cost problem.
Web development has not reached the state where non-technical end users can maintain websites. In theory, sure, in practice, there's tons of money to be made fixing hacked sites and cleaning up years of technical debt.
I would not recommend Wordpress for anything other than a simple blog. Do anything else with it, you need a developer on staff. And a simple blog will never be enough for the needs of a small business.
I'd much rather work on some 90s-era custom-built app than the vast majority of brutally hacked together Wordpress sites.
Can you suggest any more elegant solution? In my opinion WordPress is good solution with great community.
With many different people you get a lot of different levels of deployment, so maybe you didn`t have a luck?
It's not a small problem, its a huge one, and the primary reason why I can no longer recommend Wordpress.
Latest WP "hack" via botnets was because of weak logins and passwords which are set by the users. Can you blame WP devs for that?
Speaking about upgrading; making updates easier it`s also one of the goals of the project. Also it isn`t that hard when you develop WP sites using information from WordPress Codex docs.
I hope it will get better with time, and as i wrote people are working to get things better. Sorry to hear that you are not going to recommend WordPress any longer.
As far as CMSes go, I was pretty impressed with Umbraco. It lets you design the client interface that they use to update the site. It's .NET, but I've yet to see a better solution.
And they, or an unwitting employee, start using it to communicate information they shouldn't.
And their account gets owned. (Keep in mind, the content is no longer just public web pages...)
And... Even if the web site hosting should have been done this way, they still needed help/advice/pressure to be more clueful about their IT deployment and use.
A lot of small businesses look for the minimum and think things should just work.
Separately, as a favor, I spent a weekend cleaning such a business's systems after an employee clicked on a malicious attachment.
When I told them what that service was worth (particularly on short notice and over a weekend) -- mind you, I wasn't charging them anything, just trying to put the fear of God into them to prevent a repeat and to motivate some better policy and behavior -- they completely balked. One partner "called someone" and claimed a simple sub $100 scan with a packaged product would have taken care of the problem. (Never mind that they had multiple infections on multiple machines and a raft of outdated products presenting serious security implications.)
They were in a cash flow crisis. If I hadn't had billing up by Monday morning, they would have been severely screwed. Yet, they were unwilling to assign any significant dollar amount to what I'd done.
The other side of businesses that pay too much for custom web development, is businesses that treat their IT systems like a consumer-level Windows XP box. And we know what happens to those.
P.S. IT, IS... whichever acronym floats your boat.
It is really hard to have vulerabilities with static html. Similarly, hosting these costs nothing. Usually in the ballpark of $3/year, the DNS alone is the dominate cost. And if they do get a sudden inrush of traffic, static hosts need to see a thousand times more load than stock wordpress before they fall down.
Come to think of it, I've never had a client that was the correct size for Wordpress. They were either way too small or way too large.
I had a client who wanted a static site, but at the last minute decided they needed a "news" sidebar on every page that they could update. This was before any of the off the shelf solutions existed (to mixing static and dynamic content), so I wrote some javascript (before jquery made ajax easy) that grabbed the content from a flat file.
Long story short, a few years later, they had someone on staff who knew some html, and they basically turned that tiny sidebar from a div displaying 2 or 3 paragraphs of text into an entire website--complete with oversized videos, rotating image headers, and dozens of links.
Also I hadn't thought of S3 - that's a good shout.
The transfer rate is $1/GB. If you don't have many pictures and serve pre-gzipped html/css/js (needs a custom .htaccess) the bill can be very low.
If you want a car, you're paying in the thousands for a used one, in the tens for a new one, maybe hundreds if you really, really want a nice one. 10-100x, and there is no "free" entry point here.
Similarly with a house, it's pretty clear why house one costs more than house two. Using apartments in Manhattan as an example, you're looking 250K for a studio up to maybe 12.5M for a penthouse. 50x with a very clear reason.
(Otoh, concerning WP, you can, unfortunately, fit almost anything into the WP mold, or "around" it - at least when you are past the point of having read and understood most of its source code and you know the db layout by heart... yeah, it's terrible and the whole thing works against you if you want to write good, clean, testable code, but it still ends up the cheapest option you can give to a client if you want to be honest with him)
If you want a road-worthy production car with design or features that none of the extant manufacturers have seen fit to build, expect to pay on the order of $1 billion.
The overall prices are higher, but the difference in cost is similar, and the principle basically the same.
Many of the software products, proprietary or open source offer massive functionality for very low cost but this is of course because the development costs have been aggregated across many customers.
For example , I was asked to build an online customer management system for someone on a budget. So I googled around for open source solutions to the problem , found a few that fitted their requirements and showed them to the client.
Once they found one they liked, I FTPd the PHP upto their server, setup mysql and did the basic configuration for them. I then pointed them to the URL for the system, gave them some basic instruction and charged them $25 for the hour.
They were over the moon with that, since it was so quick and cheap.
Of course later they come back and say "hmm, this system is good but I wish there was an extra field here that did this and this part should work slightly differently".
So I said "hmm, ok. This is probably 5 hours work so except to pay around $125". At which point they said "What?! This is just a few small changes, how come the price is so much higher?! The system is open source, so you can just make these changes easily". This then puts you on the defensive as you have to justify that in fact to do these changes will involve reading a ton of someone elses code , finding the correct places to change things and testing that everything won't break.
Now , if they had paid $1000 for the original system (probably a fair price for the amount of actual functionality it enabled for them) then the $125 would look more reasonable.
The amount of value that they gained for the $25 was so high that you have their expectations have been set unreasonably high.
Plumbing or mechanicing have a higher barrier to entry since you usually need certifications and a significant outlay for tools/transport/premesis etc.
Try to get comfortable with the idea that you deserve to be paid very well for your work. (It's something I've had to do.) In my case, it was very uncomfortable to send that first message with my new higher rate. But I spelled out the value of the work I was proposing (which had obvious benefit for the client, but also bolstered my own mental fortitude), and the client happily agreed. And now the client is "educated" as to what this type of thing is actually worth. :)
Good luck!
Sell your knowledge of digital marketing - SEO, Adwords, etc in order to drive sales for your client, which is ultimately the reason they want a website in the first place.
I've done a ton of work for smaller outfits, and the fact is that whatever you're billing is coming directly out of their own wallet, or close to it. Imagine the shock when the mechanic says you need to spend $2,500 on a new transmission. That's what your clients feel.
That's also why I've turned away smaller projects for the past year. Everything becomes a never-ending, underpaying project from hell where you end up doing little tweaks for free because you're a nice guy/gal. You also end up competing with joker developers with lower rates who will probably do a hack job (the fight of "doing it cheap" vs "doing it right" is timeless on the small business front).
My point: If your clients are shocked and opting not to do work with you, find bigger clients. If bigger clients won't work with you, lower your rate and find smaller clients.
Even if they fight back at first, they typically give in, because quality is more important than expense (since everyone wants to cover their arse).
It depends on two things:
For many, #2 depends on #1. We see three main sources of business: Google (we rank highly for 'Toronto web design'), Dribbble (we have the 2nd most followers in Toronto, and 8th in Canada), and of course, referrals.Dribbble leaves us with clients with the biggest budgets, who aren't afraid of 5-figure prices for web design. This is where we're competing with other high-end designers and thus our prices are more in-line with theirs.
Referrals are the strongest leads, with clients who when they don't have larger budgets are more comfortable stretching a bit because of our strong work for a friend or mutual acquaintance (and we're often happy to mark down a bit for a referral).
Leads from Google are where the clients who get really shocked come in; they don't really understand or appreciate the work that needs to go into good, iterative, considered UI/UX (and the custom development that goes along with it). The competition here includes a swath of companies who game SEO and outsource work offshore, and they can charge considerably less. Thus, our prices look unreasonably higher to the untrained eye.
There's also a phenomenon where cheaper clients expect more. If you move up in terms of positioning yourself as premium, better clients will consider you and your services-- the types of clients who aren't shocked by "high prices" for design and/or development.
So, if you find all of your clients are shocked at your prices, you're not marketing towards the right clients.
I would also highly recommend listening to patio11's podcast #3 about making more as a consultant: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/10/10/kalzumeus-podcast-3-grow..., and charging more http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...
I'am a self entrepreneur and I do some web designing from time to time. I recently got a lead for a organization which had EU funding of 250'000€. They wanted me to roll two sites with independent designs and features which's content had to be editable. I offered them my full consultation in choosing everything from ground up, but they kept on asking for the price. Once I told them I never heard anything back.
I offered to do the sites for about 0.5% stake of what they got from EU, but they apparently thought it was too much.
Recently a friend of mine was observing me coding and he was astonished of the complexity of it. As he said, 'For me, a button has always been just a button with no further functionality.' I also let him to change the source code as he was interested to see what effects it has on the program. He deleted a single bracket and was amazed to find that the program failed to run. I then continued to tell him that no matter how big your codebase is, a single mistake such as that might screw it all.
He now understands my frustration better.
My clients understand they're not buying a blog, or an e-commerce shopping cart, or a newsletter system, or {insert some feature here}. Rather, they're paying for my time and expertise -- and to provide that in context of what they want.
Any time I've encountered a customer who has sticker shock, I've always focused on making sure they knew what they were buying. More often than not, that always made customers much more comfortable. And, in a few cases, I explained that they should look for someone to provide their requested service at a lower cost. (Surprisingly, several customers freaked out and then pleaded with me to take their project. Go figure.)
WORK FOR PEOPLE WITH MONEY. LOTS OF IT.
It makes all the difference in the world.
* Go to Wordpress.com
* Choose a custom address ($18.00 / year for youraddress.com)
* Pick a pleasant theme
* Type in your content
Job done, right?
As a business owner I know it will cost money but not in this rate. Now I am in Morocco with a great team, they are working 12 hours a day to finish this project for much much cheaper cost same quality. ++ Marrakesh weather is a bonus.
And when I say they don't have a clue about what's involved you need to remember that many people can't plug in a printer. They have no idea about 300 dpi or 75 dpi or low quality jpegs or cross browser ("I click 'the internet' and there it is") or HTML or CSS or anything else.
But this is perhaps an opportunity! (A painful opportunity that's possibly full of woe, but still).
You create 5 mini sites of varying levels of complexity. You start with totally passive, html & css only, no updates, few images. You then build up, including tiny bits of dynamic content (roll-overs, javascript) all the way up to full content management. You describe how many hours of work are needed to create each of these, you show examples of wireframes. You also describe the design decisions the client would need to make ("Will your content change once a year? Your best choice is X But if you will add content once a week your best choice is Y").
You then give tentative costings. You make sure they're labeled as tentative and subject to change because of work involved.
You invite potential customers to talk to you about what they need.
Hopefully this will filter out people who have wildly wrong ideas about the costs or times, and will encourage people who want a website but who were too baffled to ask.
Of course, there are many risks of dealing with totally naive clients and it could be hellish.