And as a bonus, you get to be on the hook for maintaining that site until the owner gets bored with it, making whatever changes they want (for free).

I think people always expect you to be on a learning curve when creating sites, like they think they are doing you a favour by you building it for them as it's good experience for you.

I don't know what it is with jobs where it is more of a service than labour but I feel we all get a bum rap, it's the same with SEO, I think people think it hardly takes any time at all. If I asked my friend, who is a joiner, to do some work for me, I can see the work being done and I can appreciate the time and effort gone into it, it's almost like people cannot appreciate the time projects take us.

Don't get me wrong, I have put sites together in 16 hours from scratch but they are basic sites and I don't want to maintain them. They have been favour jobs or such like, it's not how I plan spending the rest of my life.

I think the one thing I take from this story is that all people think their idea is unique or will always work. 99% of the time, the people have done no research into competition or if they have they have not evaluated the competition well enough. It's good when you do get a good idea but this does again come down to the execution, you have to be able to rely on your partner to do their fair share.

Yup, this has happened to me several times back in high school, when all the shitty bands used to approach me asking to make a website. At first I was like "yeah, cool!" and then they automatically expected me to update it consistently and do things like handle merchandise sales. LOL. Yeah right. Then they get mad at me for not maintaining it. I'm like "I made the thing, you update it".

That was my lesson. I don't make websites anymore for people without charging thousands of dollars and an hourly fee for any future work.

I think every programmer in some respects goes through that, that's how we make mistakes and learn from them.

I wouldn't be surprised if most developers actually did their first project for nothing at all, I think we all under value our skills to start with and it takes time to realise how much our skills are worth.

That's what I find funny when you put a "real" bill into do a site and you see the owners face, if their initial reaction is, "how much??!", I know it's time to go quoting for a different project.

Then one day you'll see that the site's been redesigned by a third-party for a much higher fee and you were never told or given a chance to pitch.

Actually to expand on this, I once put a price in to do a site, it was a brochure site, nothing amazing. I put in a low price as it was for a business a friend worked at (a beauty shop). It was a small business, not much free cash so I did it at a very good rate. I then found out via a phone call one day that I had not got the project as she had hired a company that was charging her twice as much.

To give me a real kick, I actually found out when the other company rang me to ask for DNS login details to change the A records, she had not even told me herself I had not got it or given the chance to show designs and a development plan.

It turns out she thought she would be getting a better service and end result as I was charging less when in fact I was doing it as a favour. It goes to show it can work either way!

Had that happen to me many times.

Problem with being a smallish web development company is that you're either getting the difficult dregs, or you're hoping large multi-disciplinary agencies don't lure away your lucrative gems.

I don't see the problem? You just tell them your fee is more than that, and that's it.

Basically, you either work for free (as a favour to friends or charity) or full charge. No in between.

The power of "free" over "friend's fee" is that they know it's a favour so they can't feel entitled to anything--and if they still do, you may feel entitled to take a dump in their kitchen sink (free of charge).

I feel like I have to jump in here. The worst clients I've ever had (and also the worst clients other businesses I've worked with have had) are the ones you do charity work for (family included). When people aren't paying for something, they place absolutely no value on your time, and without fail the relationship will sour at some point.

I'd charge a friend or charity a lower rate that they can afford but strategically set such that their budget (and amount of work they get) seems finite to them. Forces them to come up with their plan and execute, instead of "yeah that's nice, but my friend said THIS would be a better idea...can you just redo the whole thing??" Yes, you can say no, but like I said if there are expectations on either side, it can sour the relationship.

I'm with you. I lie about what I do to half my friends to avoid their hurt expressions when they find out that I'm not going to bunker down for the next 2 weeks writing their app for free.

No I agree, I don't do it. I was just pointing out what I have put in other posts