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Comment by ArchitectAnon | Hacker News Reader

$46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I’ve charged less than this to design a whole 200m² house. I built a detailed 3d model, secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site every two weeks for two years to check they were building it correctly and signed off on thier invoices to the client. This is a normal amount of work for that fee in my industry, am I an idiot?

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Also if I agreed to a fee of £7k and tried to charge a client £46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined £20k by my professional regulator.

Haha, software development doesn’t have licensing. I got downvoted for suggesting it should, so it’s unlikely to have it in the future either, unless it becomes government regulated. Which would be its own disaster, and why I think industry licensing should be a thing.

Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with UX people improving your shopping and cart page + implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to the new redesign.

tbf the agency's original "how long is a piece of string" response to website is probably fair here

Some companies really do want to a/b test their shopping cart to death, and have 40 iterations of their logo with roundtable meetings in between, and that stuff can genuinely take many man months and in the case of the a/b testing might even be time and money well spent. I'm sure some of the agency's regular clients spend $400k on getting e-commerce sites which are only a bit more complex overhauled and think they'll see value from it

But 46k is definitely unreasonable for something you've estimated at 7k, and 38 billable hours to refactor a Bootstrap template for a minimalist website with about 10 pages doesn't sound like efficient work.

Yeah, its not great, but I dont think its unreasonable. Id expect it more in 25-30k range, 7k sounds like fairy tale. Lets say you have two designers working 40 hours on this over 3 months, thats quickly 20k just there, before any implementation.

Dont joke about untangling Bootstrap from your css architecture, I’ve seen that take 6 months to get out from.

$7k doesn't sound like a fairytale, it sounds like a pretty standard ballpark for a logo and custom hero graphic, a discussion about order of homepage sections, and a cart flow with a radio button to select a product from. Easy to spend more time revising it, but that's a situation where the client should feel they're the one spending that budget. The fairytale is doing it with a $46 template and a $7 logo, but even those can have happy endings when the sought-after design is uncomplicated...

And whilst I'm sure there are complex apps and huge sites which are horrendously sensitive to untangling Bootstrap especially where pixel perfect preservation is required, we're talking about implementing three brand new pages of standard layouts plus a handful more black-on-white text pages with existing standard layouts and the new header, font and button carried over. Implementing that in 38 hours is not fast work.

I agree, I don't see it as outrageous at all. Agencies often charge too little then get scope creeped into overrunning their own labor, so smart agencies charge good money and write tight language in contracts to avoid it. It's very easy for a project that seems simple to solve to become a massive undertaking.

It sounds reasonable for a good redesign, but this is just terrible. Generic all the way.

I would’ve thought that the product photo was a strength of the offering (proof of legitimacy given designed hardware is expensive and shows commitment). But the redesign hides it away and uses illustrations like every startup’s MVP site! Seems insane.

A single person could make something that looks comparable, if not better, with SquareSpace in like two weeks. The logo is the only nice thing IMO.

You certainly are not an idiot, if you managed to do all that work up to professional standards.

You didn't say how much you charged for that job, so it is impossible to give assessment there. But it is almost certain you charged way too low.

From what I can gather, you provided a lot of services there. It's not so much the designing and the 3D model that counts, but all the services you describe, that are really, really valuable. Because you provide a total package and one that is facing regulatore/legal.

Two years of site visits alone would amount to ~50 trips. This alone would be worth 20k at least, since you also are bound for that time and cannot leave town etc. Hard to say without further details…

Doing the work and billing the work are two entirely different disciplines.

I work for a very expensive electric utility consulting firm... and I guess now I'm impressed by how much work we can actually do for 50k. This is so silly that it makes me feel like an idiot too.

You're not an idiot, you're just comparing rates in two completely different industries for some reason.

Maybe I am because I should switch careers, I’m visually literate; pretty sure I could do graphics as good as that. I’m also computer literate I’ve used bootstrap, I know how it works. I also code python well enough to understand how create my own decorators and where might be a good place to use yield and I know how to use git. Put up my own website using Jekll AWS, wrote some jekll plugins in Ruby. Dabbled in Arduino ESP PIC Etc etc

Edit: Basically it feels like I currently do an order of magnitude more work for the same money.

It's highly region dependent. In my city the work you're describing would go into the six figures(assuming you the design-architecture-engineering firm are paying the contractors).

What was that, five percent of the value of the house (land not included)? If so, seems reasonable.

More like 7%. But that’s for a completely custom design from scratch not just reprocessing an off the shelf design.

It is completely possible (and actually more probable) that you worked less, even though you delivered more and better.

Agencies and Consultings aren’t simply overcharging. They’re also weaponising incompetence and inefficiency so they can bill more hours.

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