[HN Gopher] I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)
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I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)
Author : caminanteblanco
Score : 169 points
Date : 2026-01-02 21:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (idiallo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idiallo.com)
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts
| to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was
| pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter
| accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that
| violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress
| bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was
| essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks
| Boostrap!!).
|
| I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that
| Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never
| make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time
| they don't even know how being actively involved in the process
| will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate
| them?
|
| TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.
| dawnerd wrote:
| On the flip side I've seen many projects go way over budget
| when a client is actively involved and introduces scope creep
| that turns into launch blockers. You learn quick to have strong
| contracts if doing fixed price bids.
|
| Problem seems to be clients don't know what they want early on
| and when they start to see progress they understand more what
| they were actually expecting. Obviously you'd try to get this
| out of them during project planning.
| mraza007 wrote:
| This is so true, scope creep is real when the client actively
| gets involved
|
| And when that happens it's better to move the contract to
| hourly rather having it fixed price
|
| But you are also right about having a strong contract
| rasmus-kirk wrote:
| I feel like this is where LLM's/agents could actually help a
| lot. I don't like all the hype, and think that long-term
| projects would be better off without heavily written LLM code
| in any form, but stitching together stuff for a client seems
| like the perfect use-case, as long as they understand it's
| not the final product.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Hey I wrote that :)
|
| I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was
| beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the
| process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.
|
| For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over
| $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was
| part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work,
| interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked
| and the page is still up!
|
| Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and
| mothers.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| Fyi: NixOS would shine everytime a client handed you a laptop
| for the gig. Your working environment reproducible and
| declarative. Setup in minutes, not hours.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| You don't even need full on NixOS. I do the same with nix-
| Darwin and home manager. It's not the perfect reproducible
| purists machine due to homebrew and Mac designs but it
| doesn't really need to be, just mostly so
| brainlessdev wrote:
| NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to
| install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you
| may be in for some unexpected tinkering.
|
| I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set
| up your environment just as well and is very portable, while
| still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's
| choice.
| markstos wrote:
| Agreed. Vanta does not support Linux.
| rasmus-kirk wrote:
| +1 for Home Manager, as someone who uses Nix extensively
| (NixOS for server, Nix devshells, Home Manager on my dev
| machine) it's by far the most versatile tool the Nix
| ecosystem has to offer!
| firefoxd wrote:
| 2015 me didn't know that. But chances are, I wouldn't have
| been able to install it with their company software policy
| tools.
| iberator wrote:
| Ansible and vagrant is easier and battle tested.
| brightbeige wrote:
| I get this error, iOS safari
|
| > Unable to load feed, Incorrect path or invalid feed
|
| ;)
| foxfired wrote:
| Thanks for reporting this. I'm assuming you are referring to
| the RSS feed? The actual feed is https://idiallo.com/feed.rss
| in the meanwhile until I figure out the issue
| calgarymicro wrote:
| No, they're referring to an error that pops up when you
| visit a page whose url ends in 'women-in-the-world.html';
| you can click okay and still browse the page though :-)
| firefoxd wrote:
| Haha thank you. That went over my head. I dismissed that
| box without reading the error. But... I can neither
| confirm nor deny I understand what you are referring to
| ;)
| vessenes wrote:
| That was my first reaction reading your story -- "outside
| partner probably paid 5 to 10x for it" -- if you'd gotten up to
| 50k, you would have had a problem. :)
| miduil wrote:
| Does the URL end in "women-in-the-world.html"?
| firefoxd wrote:
| That's a very good question.
| amaccuish wrote:
| When is your book coming out? (I'd love to read it)
| firefoxd wrote:
| Life got in the way (marriage, kids, covid, publisher backed
| out, etc.) But 2026 is my year, stay tuned.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2019)
|
| Some discussion then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
| tomhow wrote:
| _I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386 - May 2019 (441
| comments)
| testing22321 wrote:
| Company I worked for wanted a new public website. In the end they
| paid over 3 million for a Drupal theme. Impressive waste of time
| and money.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| That's got to be some kind of guines record. I'd like to see
| that theme.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Www.nwtel.ca
| begueradj wrote:
| More contributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
| gkoberger wrote:
| As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I
| understood this more when I was on the other side.
|
| This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved
| more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
|
| I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as
| scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the
| cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely
| someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
|
| As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars -
| rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it
| as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time
| back.
|
| It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot),
| but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like
| an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a
| common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make
| way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying
| you.
|
| For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is
| much more important than saving costs.
| FpUser wrote:
| I've had few contracts where I've made very nice money like
| $20K for what in average was 3 days. They were all urgent jobs
| from some very big companies whose managers knew about me (In
| their particular environment I was famous for doing
| "impossible" tasks in very short time). When they asked me to
| do the job I knew that they're big and can pay handsomely so
| instead of giving them my hourly rate I would just simply tell
| that I would take up to let's say 5 days and would charge them
| this total sum disregarding of how long it would take in
| reality. They were totally fine with it.
| almosthere wrote:
| Our combined careers of moving bits around where we have amassed
| trillions in developer pay for code that doesn't do anything
| previously built software could... or worse has made the world a
| horrible place... Is the bigger story.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Over the summer, the "friend of a friend" the bosses hired to run
| the website had up and fscked off (and not answering calls), and
| the rented VPSes had expired. Since I was the only person there
| (of a dozen or so in an e-waste recycling company) who did
| websites once upon a time, they said that if I could get a
| website for the company up, they'd give me $200. I threw a plain
| HTML page together in 15 minutes (mostly copy-pasted from the old
| site on Internet Archive), then spent about 45 minutes to figure
| out how Github Pages works with custom domains. I don't think
| I've ever gone from nothing to deployed website in an hour
| before!
| paxys wrote:
| I'm willing to bet this person was paid a one-time fee (just
| like you) and the bosses expected him to provide free
| maintenance and tech support for life. And if you're not
| careful this will be your fate as well. I've been in this
| position myself, and after a point you are forced to say
| "sorry, I've done my part, you are on your own now". People
| aren't willing to accept that even a simple website can have a
| recurring cost of a few engineering hours a month. And those
| hours aren't free.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| No clue. A week later, they hired a reputable local firm to
| get the old site back up in entirety, and design a whole new
| site. I'll have to ask tomorrow how that's going.
| nikanj wrote:
| That's nothing compared to the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
| subpixel wrote:
| As a freelancer I regularly got 5-figure checks without any
| hassle, it was the $600, $700, $800 checks that I had to fight
| people about.
| WackyFighter wrote:
| I never had any issue asking for a 5 figure sum. It was always
| the small payments I had to chase. I won't do small work as a
| result because it is barely worth the effort.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| The title is kind of misleading, no? The author charged $18k for
| a "7 weeks adventure where I enjoyed free lunches, drove 50 miles
| everyday, and dug through emails." Which seems like a pretty
| appropriate price to buy two months of life.
|
| The static HTML page is ancillary.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Sometimes the money is mindboggling.
|
| I was invited to a meeting with a group of investors to provide
| feedback on a tech project.
|
| Afterwards, two of them and I went to a nearby hotel for a
| sandwich and a soft drink to discuss the project. The bill for
| three sandwiches and some drinks was PS125. They didn't even
| blink.
|
| For me, that was the price of a month of groceries at the time.
| htrp wrote:
| For them the price of the 125 GBP tab is nothing compared to
| 6-7 figure investment they're about to make based on your
| advice.
| socketcluster wrote:
| I've come to believe that the software industry is the least
| meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also
| experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about
| company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The
| rest does not matter AT ALL.
|
| The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic
| project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt
| comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss
| and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.
|
| The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which
| had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily
| deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get
| DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you
| couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-
| end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a
| negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no
| iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit
| with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through
| the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company
| environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask
| question; like the author of this article described so this made
| it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first
| attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.
|
| I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry
| until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was
| using their Panasonic microwave and it was the most awful UX I
| had ever seen on a microwave; you couldn't just pin-in the
| seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start
| time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you
| had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels
| made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even
| after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to
| shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my job sucks... This
| is thew worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are
| still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this
| thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to
| others about how to build good UX..."
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(page generated 2026-01-04 23:00 UTC)