Comment by stormen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stormen | Hacker News Reader

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Already answered this, but I'll comment because you bothered to. Sure :) We're basicly two founders that have done most of the design and project management of the site. In addition, we've outsourced some design and all of the programming to Ukraine, including the mobile version. The outsourced development itself runs into the 100k's over the stretch of 1.5 years, and in addition, we've done some marketing (40-50k) and had some administrative costs (lawyers, offices, etc.). I don't have an exact sum, but it's anywhere from 190-220k.

I'm a designer and previous developer myself, but the site is actually quite broad. There is a lot more than meets the eye, such as: - an administration area - caching and indexing mechanisms - web scraping robots - various other agents and robots to update user feeds, top lists, etc. - algorithms to calculate relevance and weight for the items on each list - Wordpress plugins, possibility to embed lists, etc. ...and so forth. It's a pretty big site.

It's funny to see many people giving their "expert" opinion about how expensive your web site was, just by looking the design. It is very easy to say when: 1. You are not the one developing the site, thus You have no commitment. 2. You ignore all the other project requirements (already mentioned above) just by looking to the presentation layer.

If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.

Sure, but from the looks of things this is a pretty generic web site. If you have been doing development for a while that figure would be an instant red flag. Not blaming either party.

The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.

So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.

For all you know that figure could have been made up.

Even with moderate padding; that price tag and time frame is a bit too high, especially if you outsourced this to a team of multiple developers.

Just a general observation, I don't know much about your architecture.

It looks like you're a Norwegian company? Surely Norway has programmers who can handle this at equal or surpassing quality for less money? What was your rationale for outsourcing to begin with?

In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers. Labour laws in Norway are very strict, which means hiring someone is a big step. When we first started the project we didn't really foresee how big of a task it would end up as, so we went with outsourcing. If I had to do it again, I probably would have hired one in-house dev.

>In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers.

I still think you paid more than the site is worth but... you can get that kind of rate for freelancing PHP? I think I need to move to Norway.

You can definitely get that amount for freelancing PHP in the states.

Either you're joking, or I've wasted my career.

I'm not joking. In the right cities, the high cost of living will pull you that amount.

You and me both, i get 65$ an hour in Sweden.

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