Freelance Programming – Decreasing Costs

I am a great fan of getting freelance programmers in to do work on projects. It needs to be the right project, and the right programmer, but when the stars align, wonderful things happen. These days, I will sometimes be stuck with a problem, that I cannot solve no matter how much I Google. What is worse, these are the times when I know it should be easy to do what I want. So I go to one of the outsourcing web sites and post a project.

This will often work very well. Other times the offers that come back are scary bad. A recent project that I posted I assumed would cost about $50. This is how much work I thought it would involve, and so I could justify the expense. Unfortunately when the bids started coming in the numbers were out of the ballpark. Rather than my estimate of $50, or even the published ballpark of $30-$250, the first bid was $1500. I could see no justification for this amount. Two more bids came in, slightly lower, but still in this price range. When quizzed, I got told by one of those bidders that this reflected the amount of work involved.

After some time, having extended the project I got some better prices, in the $200 range. Comments included words like ‘I have no idea why they bid so high’. When the lower bids came in, the bidder who told me that this did reflect the work actually cut their price by 80%! If they were prepared to tell me that they were unable to do that until they saw competition, I did not really want to deal with them.

Eventually I found a programmer who was enthusiastic, although I did feel that the bid was a bit high. So I checked his resume, and found that he was had the skills to do another project I wanted done. So I told him what I wanted, and that I felt his existing bid was a bit above my budget. The programmer came back with an offer – for an extra $30 I could get both projects done.

Basically, from a software perspective, this means I get everything I wanted within my project budget despite some inflated prices. A win I would say!