
I want build Email service Website Like Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo (for $500-$1000) - ndabas
https://www.elance.com/j/gmail-like-email-service-website/38955940/
======
winestock
Just because you're not in a cubicle doesn't mean that you've escaped the
Dilbert comic strip.

Now that the shutdown of Google Reader is in the news, about two weeks ago,
someone posted an offer on Elance for a website with a few RSS feeds posted to
it. When I made a proposal asking for details, I got an e-mail essentially
asking for Google Reader but with a snazzier user interface. Yup, the asking
price was "less than $500."

I sent an e-mail in reply pointing this out as diplomatically as I could. A
few days later, I got an e-mail saying that the project had been canceled.

It saddens and enrages me to ponder how many people either have so little
respect for programmers or so much ignorance of programming that they think
that they can get away with this. Would these people try the same thing with
lawyers? Or even plumbers?

~~~
rlpb
> Would these people try the same thing with lawyers? Or even plumbers?

I'm sure that lawyers and plumbers field questions from people who don't
understand what they cost all the time. It's part of doing business.

~~~
cpursley
Exactly. Developers really get their panties in a wad over this. Get over
yourselves.

~~~
winestock
I did not downvote you, nor do I think that you should have been downvoted.
Sure, perhaps plumbers and lawyers get unreasonable price requests as much as
programmers. Sadly, getting panties in a wad over this — in one way or another
— is the only way to keep wages up. If we are not for ourselves, then who will
be?

~~~
rartichoke
I feel like this happens much less often for lawyers. I never heard of someone
say "let's hire a lawyer, it'll cost almost nothing". It's always the exact
opposite. People assume a lawyer is going to be really expensive because they
are.

Everyone seems to always know their uncle's friend's nephew's brother who
makes web sites for $100 so they assume a 2 page static site of horribad
quality will cost the same as anything else.

~~~
rlpb
I guess that makes sense. Could this be because lawyers artificially limit
their supply, so all lawyers are expensive?

On the other hand, programmers do not. There exist programmers who are cheap.

~~~
rartichoke
I don't think they artificially limit their supply. I'm not a lawyer but I'm
pretty sure you need to pass a fairly difficult exam and maybe need some
formal schooling?

That's going to cut down on the supply of lawyers.

Programming can also be done remotely. Having someone working in India where
the cost of living for them might be 50x less than NYC is going to result in
them working for a cheaper price than a programmer in NYC.

You can't really hire a plumber or lawyer from another country and expect them
to be able to do their job remotely too.

------
jasonkolb
I'm willing to pay someone up to $10-15 to rebuild the transmission on my car,
but I need it by this afternoon. It also needs to be converted from manual to
automatic in the process. Provide your own parts.

------
laumars
Why not just install Roundcube[1] on top of your preferred MTA? It's free and
it's going to be more polished than any $500 bespoke project.

[1] <http://roundcube.net/>

~~~
drchaos
For $500 one could easily install roundcube, add some branding to the default
skin, and still have some budget left for ramp-up support or doing some
additional tweaks.

From this point of view, the project and budget is actually quite reasonable.

------
tobiasu
Setup mail server, install roundcube. Done.

~~~
dkroy
I was about to post this exact same thing. It actually would be quite easy to
do.

~~~
lucb1e
Don't forget the hosting costs of like, uh, $15 for three months. $985 profit
in 1 hour!

~~~
greenyoda
Don't forget taxes either.

------
elmuchoprez
1.) Set up google apps account. 2.) Turn on a custom skin. 3.) Profit?

~~~
jgeerts
Now that is agile.

~~~
juskrey
MVP

------
josefresco
Funny how we ridicule freelance sites like elance and their seemingly
ingnorant project requests and race to the bottom pricing model yet celebrate
low budget - super fast development feats of engineering like
[http://blog.zite.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-is-dead-so-
we-...](http://blog.zite.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-is-dead-so-we-rebuilt-
it-for-you-in-zite-in-six-hours/)

~~~
18pfsmt
I'm not sure that's fair because zite obviously already had some degree of
integration with Google Reader, and an elegantly enough built back-end to
speed further integration (admittedly, I don't know the specifics).

As a side note: I'm not a user of zite, feedly (sp?), or flipboard, and I
can't stand these magazine-like interfaces. It seems to me, people that want
that sort of interface never want to see the RSS acronym, nor know what it is/
how it works.

------
yashg
This is no exception. elance, freelancer, odesk are full of such projects. And
he will get a lot of bids, someone will even be ready to do it for $100! There
are lots of people out there who think building and running a web service like
email or social network or even a search engine is a piece of cake!

With news of one year old startups getting acquired for billions Everybody
wants to be a web entrepreneur. :) During my freelancing days I have seen a
lot of such requests, and they never actually get awarded because someone
sensible will write a comment saying you can't build such a service for that
amount and that the front end they see is just the tip of the iceberg and
there are costs involved in running the servers and getting users and all.

But there are some who go ahead and in fact at places like scriptcopy.com you
will find clone scripts for almost anything - Facebook, eBay, Hotmail. I have
seen someone selling Yahoo clone script for $20! Some even provide hosting. Go
figure!

------
tomasien
According to the way my boss thinks, I'm sure this wouldn't take me more than
a week.

~~~
meepmorp
Pfft. I could knock this out in a weekend, maybe an all-nighter if I make some
really strong coffee.

~~~
zeroexzeroone
pop some modafinil, you'll be done in 4 hours if your genetics are conducive
to the drug...

~~~
X4
geez..you don't really take such drugs, do you? Have you ever tried turkish
coffee? A friend of mine is a coffee junkie, but he got a racing heart and
felt immensly active after one cup. Something he never felt before and we
coded until 4 in the Morning :) hehe However he'll stick to less coffeinated
drinks in the future.

Even coffeeine should be used in limited dosasges. So, please don't recommend
drugs anymore.

------
bdcravens
Why is this news? These kinds of postings have been on Elance / RentACoder/
Guru.com / etc since 2000, when I first started looking at those sites. Many
of which are probably more outlandish than this.

------
eterpstra
For those who are now pondering a weekend project...

<http://twitter.github.com/flight/demo/>

------
rachelbythebay
If they're going to pay $500 for it, give them $500 worth of work. Let's see,
if you bill $150/hour, then that's 3 full hours. 3 full hours, assuming you
type 120 wpm, with 10 minute breaks per hour, that's 18KB.

As stupid as what I described is, I bet it would appeal to the people who
think you can clone something like that for $500. Scope is everything!

------
usaphp
Looks ridiculous at first glance...and the more I think about it - the more
ridiculous it looks to me...

------
nihit
Just ask this guy to send across a requirement document/ wireframes. Nip it in
the bud I say :-D

------
jiggy2011
Freelancer websites are full of things like this. "ebay clone with all
features" etc.

Problem is, how does one define "all features". Does it mean all the obvious
features, like the ability to list an item and have people buy/bid on it.

Or do they want an actual replica of ebay complete with all the anti-fraud
stuff that ebay must have and all of the seller account controls etc?

Obviously there's a huge difference between the two, but you won't get much
more detail from them than "I just want all the features, should be simple".

So yes, you can probably make an "ebay clone" in a day or two, but what
happens if they refuse to pay because it doesn't have some advanced feature
that ebay does?

------
mherdeg
See also <https://www.elance.com/j/website-like-amazon/37294947/> ("I want a
website like Amazon for $1000"), submitted to news.ycombinator on 14 Feb.

------
krapp
>Project Will Given to who post complete structure details + resume

I don't know what 'complete structure details' even means but I assume it
means something they could toss to another developer for the excuse of paying
them less and the schmucks who apply nothing at all. I've already made the
mistake of completing a "test" of putting together a couple of email templates
for a job that then magically never materialized after I was "awarded" it.

I will point you to my github and linkedin profile, but you're not getting
free work.

------
cbg0
There are plenty of projects like these on freelance websites; They either end
up being a low quality clone with fewer features than the original, or never
get funded to begin with.

------
kaoD
Is it really THAT unreasonable ? Throw some random open source mail server and
web interface, customize et voilà!

~~~
analog
Roundcube would probably do the job. The problem is what if the guy says "but
this doesn't have feature X that gmail has, add it or I won't pay you."

If you could change the spec to be "install roundcube" then maybe it wouldn't
be such a bad deal, but then you're essentially doing the most important part
of the work (telling him _how_ to get what he wants) for free.

~~~
hippich
And this will happen. Usually such projects get half-done and half-paid.

------
damoncali
To be fair, we don't know the expected use and it says to state the features
to be included. If you throw in non US labor rates, you _might_ get something
useful. Admittedly, I'm reaching.

This is why I don't look for work on these sites. I'm literally better off
just sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.

------
niggler
There's a nonzero chance that this is a honeypot designed to draw out the bots
or incompetent devs.

~~~
damoncali
If so then Elance is 90% honeypots.

------
nasalgoat
I am reminded of the questions I see posted on Quora with some regularity - so
many that show a staggering ignorance of the most basic systems fundamentals,
coming from people claiming to be professionals.

------
gokhan
Give the job to this guy: [http://fiverr.com/farooqahmed/develop-website-for-
you-in-htm...](http://fiverr.com/farooqahmed/develop-website-for-you-in-
htmlcss-on-your-instructions)

~~~
patchfx
He sure doesn't look like a native of Pakistan.

------
dekken_
How many users are you expecting?

------
wilfra
Looks ridiculous at first glance but that's actually not unreasonable.

The value in Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo is first and foremost their users. Next is
the technical infrastructure to support all of those users. The front-end
website and basic functionality of sending and receiving emails isn't that
hard of a technical problem.

Given the level of intelligence this guy appears to have, an Indian PHP dev on
elance who charges $10 an hour could probably build something in 50-100 hours
that would support far more users than this guy would ever be able to attract
and they would both be happy with the transaction.

~~~
aviraldg
> an indian PHP dev on elance who charges $10 an hour

Stereotyping much?

~~~
ssharp
If I post a job to one of these sites, it's pretty much guaranteed to get 20+
responses from devs in India. Most are pre-written responses that don't really
show that the project was read in any sort of detail.

I'd actually be curious to find out how these operations actually work. Are
they solo devs just casting a massive net ? Solo devs actually outsourcing
responding to gigs? Agencies applying for as many jobs as possible and
subcontracting them out or having employees on staff to do the work?

~~~
damoncali
I think they're just cheap and aggressive companies. I had one calling me
daily trying to "partner". I had to yell at him to get him to stop.

What I don't get is why some of these guys don't approach business like their
US counterparts and charge US rates. They could live like kings in some areas
of the world. Maybe that's easier said than done. But even the good ones seem
to compete on price.

~~~
wilfra
Ya I don't get that either. It's a race to the bottom. I mean I love finding
diamonds in the rough that don't know what they're worth. I have a guy who
does Rails jobs for me, used to work for Microsoft, went to a top Indian
technical college, speaks perfect english and is really, really good - and he
charges me $25 an hour. He could easily be charging $100+/hr if he just
marketed himself to different clients (i.e. not on elance).

I guess it's the opposite of what's going on in San Francisco where anybody
with a CS degree or equivalent experience expects six figures. There they all
expect very little and are happy to get a bit more than the guys hustling hard
for $10/hour.

