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As an Indie Maker, What would you pay for dev freelancer?
I've been freelancing for a while, and have an mern saas dev agency now.
Most of my clients are boring businesses. I want to work more with indie makers on interesting projects. But I'm sure I won't be able to do it on the current prices.
What do you think would be the best price for Indie Makers? What would you be willing to pay for something like this? maybe on a weekly basis?
Most of my clients are boring businesses. I want to work more with indie makers on interesting projects. But I'm sure I won't be able to do it on the current prices.
What do you think would be the best price for Indie Makers? What would you be willing to pay for something like this? maybe on a weekly basis?
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Zero.
I don't lack the means to build but the means to distribute.
Also nothing the underlying reason for going indie is being fully self reliant being fast and keeping costs as low as possible. Only if something start making real money would I consider outsourcing things to save time
100%!
"How long is a piece of string"?
Each project and client is different.
If current prices are tied to time, consider value based pricing. Look into Jonathan Stark's content around it and try to structure you work around it.
A good read is also Developer Hegemony.
Your value proposition needs to become the outcomes of software, not the software itself.
I've only been doing project/value based pricing till now. But recently, I've been thinking about opening a cheaper freelance thing for makers cause most won't be able to afford 10k/month. But unsure about what range makers are comfortable with.
Like @nikspyratos said, you should read Stark’s stuff. What a maker wants to pay you depends on the value you bring.
I have a page getting hella traffic with good conversions but 50% of users get an error and can’t buy? I’ll pay you a bunch to fix that for me.
I have a product with zero users and low interest? Giving you even 10 bucks feels like a lot.
To give a more concrete example: I have a bunch of problems on my blog that I’d really love to fix but it isn’t worth my time. Would love to pay someone to do it for me, but there isn’t nearly enough work to even begin talking about a /month price.
Indies are by definition builders, what you sell basically takes away what they enjoy to do. Probably best to pivot your target audience a bit :)
I agree with this. Targetting an audience where your work is a commodity limits its value to them. It's a hard cycle to break out of because often times that tends to be your own niche.
Basically, don't expect much pay if you're targetting people with your skills as clients.
You’re going to have a hard time selling to indie makers. You have to realize these are the types of people that actively avoid any kind of expenses and do the development themselves. I would pick a different clientele
been thinking more and more about this. there are some REALLY boring stuff that I just dont want to learn and would be ideal if someone can do them for me.
kind of like paying someone to have access to my repo and open a PR with a solution.
A good example of this would be setup zero downtime deployments on the digital ocean VPS.
I think the author wants to know how much you would be ready to pay. And how often...
PS. If you use Copilot, it does most of these things for you, if you got existing code it has seen.
This kind of tasks is exactly what I'm thinking about for makers. Around a month ago, I was organising my tasks list, and I found a lot of tasks that were maintenance, and I had been delaying them for too long. I ended up getting two developers to just clean up my maintenance tasks list. And I am thinking of turning this into a service if enough makers are interested.