Adding Pricing Details
It’s been a long time since I updated anything here, so I suppose it’s time for an update :). Ever since I got off working on PrintFriendly.com full-time, I have been more or less continuously working on a Version 2 of an existing client’s site. It’s pretty much a re-write, and it seemed like the work to be done seemed to be never-ending, but I’m happy report that we’re nearing launch, almost everything is wrapped up except a few final details. I will write a separate post as soon as the site is launched.
Since that work is ending too, I started entertaining some new project offers. Actually I do that all the time, but I normally regretfully turn down any new work unless my part of the job is finished on existing projects. I’m not a big multi-tasker, and I’d like to keep the things that I concentrate on at a time to a low number so I can do a good job on all of them (hopefully). So I get all sorts of proposals, right from writing a billing system for a telecom company to launching a new social network aimed at a particular niche. I try to pick up projects related to social media/consumer internet, as that’s where our core strengths lie.
Just like we are blessed with great clients to work with, sometimes we get pretty perplexing potential ones too. Luckily the case has been that we could afford to be picky, because we take extreme care about what kind of clients we work with, and what kind of projects we work on. But there is an unfortunate trend - being a services company from India, the automatic association in most people’s mind is “cheap”. This may be justified given the amount of back-office work that gets done from India, that too at very competitive rates. But it gets perplexing when people try to do the same thing to something very high-end, like web application consulting.
No matter where we are in the world, talent costs real money, and we are not immune to this. We are proud to do a good job on each and every client that works with us, and we like to believe we are technically at least as good as the consulting shops in the western hemisphere. So it hurts to see prospective clients try to bargain about our hourly rates - we work extremely hard to make your site kick ass, so we believe we deserve to get what we are charging. Even then, they tend to be very very competitive with respect to consulting shops elsewhere in the world.
So I have decided to publish our hourly rates. We are also planning to publish our available hours (check ‘Pricing’ on the left navigation panel of our main site), so you could book a particular batch of time in a particular month. As we add more people, more hours will be available, and you can just drop us a mail and pay a small fraction of the booked time as initial fee, and we will block those hours for you. Until then, kindly drop us a mail and ask for availability. I once again like to heartily thank our present and past clients, for your continuing support and opportunity to work on such cool projects. We hope to continue doing world-class work for you.