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Developer's Corner / Re: Pricing Strategies for Products and Services
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on December 22, 2012, 07:46 AM »Hmm.
I've been on the buying side a few times for my commissioned widgets. Because they are designed for personal use and anyone else liking them is just gravy, I've come up with a few principles of my own.
1. I specialize in low risk widgets, just to get some stuff done. As soon as an idea begins to slide out of the range of the coding snacks here, I start thinking about commissioning stuff. As a strange take on the "Outsourcing is Evil" dept, yeah, upon threat of being stoned, I'll admit I look on oDesk which has a lot of low-fee workers.
2. Since it's just me, I can let certain bugs slide for a while and think about touching them up later. It's shades of that "worse-is-better" article posted elsewhere. I-As-Client need time to thrash out features I had no idea would matter. My PDF batch saver is a funny example. It's supposed to be so insanely simple, that's why I asked it as a snack. But since that didn't pan out, I began commissioning it as a mini-app. It turned out that I need some slightly clever file-naming heuristics which I had sorta gotten wrong in my initial spec.
3. So if I-As-Client think my spec is going to move around a little, sometimes it's interesting to do the thrashing with a less skilled contractor with a lower rate per hour, so that what is basically R&D-ish stuff doesn't break the bank. Then I sometimes traded it off to a higher end worker with a mostly defined proof of concept and say "go polish this up." I've heard back sometimes that low grade worker code is bad, but even if the new worker has to completely rip the code in half, the value was in me saving time playing all Pointy-Headed-Boss trying to figure out WTH I needed.
Yay Pricing fun!
I've been on the buying side a few times for my commissioned widgets. Because they are designed for personal use and anyone else liking them is just gravy, I've come up with a few principles of my own.
1. I specialize in low risk widgets, just to get some stuff done. As soon as an idea begins to slide out of the range of the coding snacks here, I start thinking about commissioning stuff. As a strange take on the "Outsourcing is Evil" dept, yeah, upon threat of being stoned, I'll admit I look on oDesk which has a lot of low-fee workers.
2. Since it's just me, I can let certain bugs slide for a while and think about touching them up later. It's shades of that "worse-is-better" article posted elsewhere. I-As-Client need time to thrash out features I had no idea would matter. My PDF batch saver is a funny example. It's supposed to be so insanely simple, that's why I asked it as a snack. But since that didn't pan out, I began commissioning it as a mini-app. It turned out that I need some slightly clever file-naming heuristics which I had sorta gotten wrong in my initial spec.
3. So if I-As-Client think my spec is going to move around a little, sometimes it's interesting to do the thrashing with a less skilled contractor with a lower rate per hour, so that what is basically R&D-ish stuff doesn't break the bank. Then I sometimes traded it off to a higher end worker with a mostly defined proof of concept and say "go polish this up." I've heard back sometimes that low grade worker code is bad, but even if the new worker has to completely rip the code in half, the value was in me saving time playing all Pointy-Headed-Boss trying to figure out WTH I needed.
Yay Pricing fun!
... I've been bouncing between that and U2's It's a beautiful day.