Well, its happened again, actually 3 times this week alone. A past potential customer contacts us and tells us their programmer has disappeared, did not finish building their website, and will not return phone calls or emails. This happens all the time. Here is what usually happens in our world.
Customer submits to us for a quote and then decides to go with another person or company. That person or company under quoted and did not check for feasibility of the requested functionalities and tasks. We cannot compete with $1.00 per hour programmers and companies that fail to tell their potential customer that what they want cannot be done. Because another person or company under-priced, short estimated the time frame, over promise and did not do feasibility studies, they set themselves up for failure.
Time passes and maybe a month or two later we get contacted that they would like us to complete the project that we did not get. Except now, they have no funds and are in distress because the site needs to get done, and can I do them a favor. They sweeten the deal with promises of more work.
The work that was done is usually full of bugs and errors, and they tell us it should only take a few hours for us to fix. Will, be it were the case, its just not. This is an ever worse position for us to be in, as now we have to build on bad coding. If the site is throwing errors, it is most likely that the existing coding is wrong, and that we will have to do it from scratch or spend many hours debugging to fix it. We usually find the integrity of the code to be poor and have to start over.
Where does $1.00 an hour or cheap imply quality workmanship. We are more than happy to finish these projects and do. And we may be known to give some kind of a break, but if the site is in error, its because of code.
Where am I going with all of this. Because a potential client wanted to save a few dollars, they end up spending MORE, getting POOR work and quality, getting LESS because what they thought was feasible is not, losing a lot of time, and having to deal in many cases with their customer that they are building the site for.
We set the expectation up front, give reasonable prices, and let you know what can and cannot be done. Yes, it may cost a little more than a dollar, but in the end, its worth it to get the job done right!!
