Joomla! Discussion Forums

Wow this is my exact model. The only problem with this model is that eventually I find my "sales" guys decided to start their own company.
So now I stopped with that and I just do sales on my own which causes my prices to go up as well. I am doing 1-2 sites per month average with average price of 6k each. The most I have ever sold was 5 sites in one month. The only problem with going that hardcore is that you eventually cant keep up with the work load you have and then everyone complains about how slow you are. The longest I have gone without work was 2 months.

How many site are you doing per month? My typical rate is $85 per hour.
My project rates are
2k for up to 3 designs in photoshop.
2k for converting a site to joomla
includes
2 afternoons of free training and educating the client on how to operate it.
plus 1 - 2 templates main page and inner page
2k search optimizing it
This includes some linking, keyword optimization, competitive research, educating them on how online biz work.
2k for setting up sugarcrm and hooking it to the contact form
All custom components are straight hourly.

I find that my biggest problem is that I need to quote allot of people and sometimes work goes totally flat.
This means that if your smart you must prepair for up and downtime.
The average time it takes me to close a deal is about 60-120 day from first contact.
I tend to be very sharing with as much information as I can with my customers and use my personal touch to try to get them to use my services.

Also for this model to work you need to be very active in your community. Start a user group! Goto networking events. Help people who dont have money to build their site for free then ask them to find you references.

When you first get started you must give you work away but after you do about 20-30 sites if you do a good job then people will not stop calling you. Sometimes the new people calling can be very problamatic when you need to get work done. Which is why most of us are night owls. 10am to 5pm the phone rings off the hook with people who want to talk about ideas and project and stuff and then at night we sit online and work on sites. Its not an easy life.

I know some people who have stores but that is hard as you need to do a ton of work to make a profit. Store rates are 125 per hour.
Thats because you must account for the building and people.

Wanna make 100k per year?
2 sites per month * 5k each = 10k
10k * 12 months = 120k per year.

By the end of the year you have made 22 sites.
Outsource 20k worth of work. and you have 100k per year.

Now how do you make more?
Find one product at the end of the year that you did not offer to all your clients.
Give them that product for 1-2k each and you have an extra 20k earned per year.

This is the model I use. The hard part is the first 2 years you need to make sure to optimize your referals.
Offer free sites to people who you know and bite the bullet until you can be a closer.
Educate your clients. Educate your friends and business will come your way.

Also now that I am in year 3 of doing development I am finding that some clients are needy. Even with Joomla they just don't want to do the work them selves. For them I am doing a 40 hour minimum reoccuring work week per month at $65 per hour no rollover $2600 per week.
I have 2 clients on that plan now and 2 pending.

Once you build up your base and people are fighting over you, you can charge what ever you want or you can hire people. Depends on what you want to do. Also as I run a php user group I get all most all the other local PHP developers messed up projects.

Don't go online and compaire yourself to developers in india or you will starve. And never match someone elses quote. Stick to your guns and your prices based on how much you want to make per year and how many projects you can handle. The more you charge the better your quality gets and the more people want your work. People love to pay more for quality.

Promote Promote Promote.....

LOL VS....so you know the Mantra...never do that, you can't do that, It's not right to do that, ok we are going to do that for now!

After creating an extension and releasing it as GPL. We all agree that there will be tons of copies out there floating and if the developer charges for the download he will probably only receive his fee on a few. Before it actually gets released by someone else. Something however that does not need to be licensed as GPL is image files and css. most extensions the really good ones any way include image files and css some even with their own templates. Release a plain looking extension. Now show the customer what it could look like if they update the files with a new template or image file pack. For this you could create 100's. This pack however can be licensed any way the developer sees fit. And it does not have to follow GPL because it is a separate works.

Now what has just happened?  Instead of selling hundreds of extensions. The developer lets users distribute thousands of copies,of his product for FREE.

And for a quick fixer up to match their site they go to the developers site to get the image pack they want.
And also if needed can sign up to membership for support.

Now we are talking more than one choice for the user and several options for the developer. He could triple sales alone by selling multiple image packs to the same user.

Sounds good to me... The harder it is to set this stuff up the more clients we all get.

Lets say the development of an extension with time involved added for work we put our cost of the project at $5000.00 i know this is extremely high but just a scenario.

to sell as a commercial licence you would have to charge 100 people $50.00 to break even.

If the extension is GPL and its gotta be good with a cost of $5000.00
you charge $5.00 for an Image pack which may i remind you is not released under GPL and cannot be redistributed by user.

most new extensions that are free range anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 in downloads  the first week.

take half of that and assume they want an image pack now you just made $25,000 on a $5000 budgeted extension and thats just in the first week. Of course it relies on the user buying image packs but $5.00. You cant even make images youself for that price.

High? thats not high at all!!!!!
charge 500 bucks for your extention and only sell 10 of them!!!!
Then lower the price after you make your money back to something that no one will bother to rip off.

in GPL eco system it is not uncommon for the first copy of an extention to cost a TON.
Charge 5k for the first copy of it if you need to. Someone wants it that bad trust me.
Sell it to a client. That is the most common way an extention gets funded.

Wow! I was going to suggest exactly such a model.

One way out of this GPL confusion would be if 3PD went together and created an universal bridge, or a proxy as you call it, which handled all the communications between the client application (the end product) and Joomla. Done cleverly enough, such a bridge would secure that Joomla's stabiity and security wasn't compromised.

Some might claim that to comply with Joomla, such a brigde has to GPL, and consequently the end product had to be GPL too because it hooks into the bridge. Wrong. Instead, the bridge could hook into the end product. I have seen claims that if a program links into a GPL product, the program itself is GPL. But I have not seen anyone claiming the opposite.

I for sure can say that some of my extensions could easily circumvent GPL in this manner.

This a much better thread to read. 
Going in a POSITIVE direction.

A bridge mechanism was one of the first things that popped into my head when this whole discussion started.

Moving this thread to the lounge.

Well thats fine if the user wants to invest that much. And then later find out its selling for much less. It doesn't keep good company in business relations. the main goal is to spread your extension throughthe comunity. Then start receiving a steady income off sales of addons and updates to your extension.
Now that everyone knows extensions must be distributed GPL it going to be very hard to sell the original copy at a high price. Because everyone knows someone will release it for free

Not to throw the thread OT, but yes, a podcast has been recorded and will be coming soon

Another scenario comes to mind. IANAL, but you could potentially run a free-standing PHP script that would interact with a Joomla! system through web services. You might have to package a GPL-licensed listener component that would contain your DB model and other sensitive operations, while running the interface as a totally separate script that communicates via HTTP (through something like JSON, SOAP, or WDSL, for instance). Although some of your low-lying code would be GPL (which people would be able to build their own implementation off of if they desired), you could cleanly license a copyrighted proprietary frontend in an external script. This would limit the kinds of proprietary extensions available, but in my mind, this is a clear boundary line you could base some proprietary code off of.

Not trying to undermine anything the core team is trying to accomplish, but I think this is worth considering. It would open up *some* of the commercial code while allowing for a proprietary element if desired. Am I on any sort of a track here?

I guess such a "thing" will cost performance on high traffic joomla sites ... why putting developers such blocks in the ways instead of making thinks easyer? Sorry but when i read this it sounds for me like a kind of "how to break a DRM copyprotection in a legal way" .. don't get me wrong but why must there be such a stronger force on the GPL that brings users/developers on such ideas to undermine it instead of putting forces together and letting the users have to decide what to buy or what not to buy?

There is the question of load, but there are also ways to mitigate this through caching and such. Additionally, a lot of web apps these days are moving towards AJAX-style implementations that already operate in this vein.

The thing is, I don't see how this is any different from what people are discussing with templates, where the CSS and images are not covered by the GPL but the index.php file is. Also, this scenario wouldn't undermine the GPL. The database models and functionality would almost have to be included in traditional extension methods and thus would be GPL. The only layer that wouldn't be GPL would be the views/UI. Another developer would be free to implement their own views/UI that they could license any way they pleased. This way, the community would get the code they're probably most interested in anyway and the developer would be able to sell individual site licenses for the UI without having to base a model off selling documentation or support (I think most people would rather buy software that's well designed enough not to need extra help).

Just my 2c on "bridge" workaround.  If I'm hearing right we are talking:

Joomla! <-> XML-RPC/Ajax Bridge <-> Propriety clone of "Joomla!"-like CMS

Couple of problems I see here:

1. The user has install 2 other things
2. There are 2 more points of failure, not just your component (limit it to a component for now)
3. You have to administer a second "thing"
4. Someone has to design the bridge and the second framework come CMS
5. How many Bridge/Frameworks are there going to be?  Is everyone going to band together to use one?  How are you going to avoid the obvious royalty squabbles that would surface.
6. He/she who holds the keys to the Bridge/Framework, well, has a monopoly.
7. You have a perfectly good framework in 1.5, why learn another
8. RPC apps (XML/Ajax) are a cow to debug.
9. Would there seriously be a return on investment from this approach?

But, where I do see this working is in this case.  You have a GPL extension that does a job.  Part of it's job is made easier by wizards.  Those wizards could reside on "your" server, never to be released, and the free extension communicates with them.  That service is via subscription only.  That approach makes a whole lot of sense because you can write your server application in the Joomla! framework (hence reducing your lost costs to tooling up on a new way of doing things).  One way to comply with the GPL in terms of proprietary software is "don't distribute".  Bingo, everything is in compliance.  You could even give the extension away for free providing there is enough generated need for your "subscription" offering, whatever form that takes, is deemed to be worth forking out the dollars for.

Um, examples.  Oh, let's be cheeky.  Say you (Bill) design a killer blog.  It's commercial GPL at, oh, $49 a unit.  That fee gives you 1 include access to a server-side wizard that takes a dump of your existing wordpress, moveable type, XYZ blog and imports, slices and dices, etc, for you.  Additional "conversion" can be purchased for $19 or something.  Immediately you have set up the scene for a micro-industry to happen.  I come along and I work on projects.  Hey, this is great.  Bill, let's make a deal.  I'm only going to use your software for people wanting a blog.  I'll do the support (oh thank goodness Bill says) and customer liaison, and I'll funnel every conversion through you for $19 a pop.  Bill is laughing because he just direct debits my account for each conversion and he's printing money (ok, not that easy but you get the idea).  But he's lost $30.  No he hasn't, he made money but the simple fact that I've taken on the support.

It's over-simplified I know, and it's got some obvious problems because the example isn't water-tight, but there are lots of variations and permutations that can be explored along these lines.

Although it sounds interesting, I personally think that there are far too many problem with the idea. If additional tools are required (import/export feature for example), most 3PD developers are already including it in their apps as part of the feature. To set up the 'micro-industry', would mean that developer has to selectively take out some key strategic features. Bill customer can't effectively provide support to his sub-customer, as obviously no one know the app better than Bill himself. Keep in mind that with current model, developer are forced to consistently think of ways to reduce support by making the app more intuitive and easier to use. Your particular model also show that it actually cost more for everyone at the end.

I agree that "bridge" is not a good solution at all. No sane developer would like it. But at the moment, it seems like a bridge is one of the viable option that allow 3PD to continue their currently working and business model and be compliant to Joomla's interpretation (wihle making no one happy. + Customer not happy as the solution is clearly a hack. + Developer not happy, + Joomla shouldn't be happy as developer are running away their precious API ). But at least it is compliant with Joomla's interpretation.

edited: spelling.

But who is going to underwrite the between 10 and 50 thousand dollars it's going to cost to invent (not just develop) a new way to connect to Joomla!.  And if someone does, are they likely to want to share it for nothing with that level of investment?  And if you are going to that trouble, why not just write a new proprietary CMS from scratch and be done with it.  At that point you can now look around at existing proprietary CMS's and see how successful they are.  Client goes "nah, let's go FOSS after all" ... you've gone full circle.  *shrug*

If you don't want to give out the code of your commercial component there's only two solutions: make it standalone, and you'll have to provide a bridge. Or you never distribute it, which means if you still want to sell it, you'll have to host it. Which means if your server ever goes down, or slow or whatever, so do all client sites -bad, not something I personally would ever buy.
So far, Core has said that there are possible alternative business models (but hasn't provided explicit examples) and they'd help 3rd party dev's get their extensions compliant. Why not help them also by providing some viable and working ideas on how to make money from their extensions?
It might not be thier job to provide business models to 3PD, but it might easy the pain for some of them to see that they do actually get help, not just "speak to your lawyer" -how many times was this used in the last 2 days?
[edited to add last sentence]

the technical merits of a bridge are a bit ot, but good fodder to continue the valid discussion of different business models to make money.

Most of the core and a lot of Joomla as I can see are probably too young (weren't born yet) to remember the Phoenix Bios.

When the IBM PC-XT (original) came out, Microsoft was actually the author of the bios.  Along comes Phoenix - they "blackboxed" the bios.

IOW: They had 1 team of developer review the bios (IBM's) and describe the 'functionality' and then in turn another set of programmers, not allowed to see the original source/rev. eng. effort - wrote a new set of codes that actually mimiced the functinonality, but not the code.

Yes - IBM sued. They lost. The precedence stands today - and you are probably using their BIOS in your desktop/laptop today (if you have a Dell you have portions of it for sure).

Point? - A bridge, done right, could be a viable technical work around. IOW; two sides: a GPL side that is open (as in free-beer) and speaks to Joomla! - a published and licensed other side that devs could write too, it translates and speaks to Joomla! on your behalf.

Sad that that much effort would go to a bridge, but the ideals of gnu seemed to have shunted that to 'ground'.

in anycase, back to the topic.

I see several means:

1) services - pure play
2) installs - low return but there
3) appliance or embedded strategy - interesting and well within the confines of gnu.

any thoughts on 1-2-3 or any other ways of doing business?

Its coming! I'm writing one but given I'm also trying to comment on the forums its not helping either (on top of everything else thats on my plate at present) on some stuff. Its going to have speak to your lawyer at the bottom because each individual case is different and local laws may influence your options as well.

This is much closer to what I was thinking (although I think you could probably get a way with distributing the wizard as well). And yeah, the hosted option could be possible, but then you have to make sure you're server's up and running for all of the customers.

Joe, Sam:

How does a business person(s) convert this type of structure (forget the engineering, alibeit impressive) into use. To convert it to a business model?



thank you

First if your developing the extention on top of gpl software you have almost no choice in the matter. Your ability to explain the complications of licencing to your client is also difficult. There are thousands of free extentions here and trust me some client somewhere paid for most of them. In other words

Hi Client I can make you a website with these 100 features with no cost to you then you can save that money
and pay me 5k for building the GPL component you need. Yes I know your component will be GPL so I will have access to give it away but
considering that you saved 20 grand by not having to custom build this cms system then that is a fair trade no?
easy sell!!!! Plus you are not required to redistribute it and in those cases where the client wants some kind of agreement to save the software getting out you can licence it under gpl and then sign an non disclosure or agreement that you wont advertise it etc.

Only when you plan to resell and your worried about the ability to protect that code is it a problem. Clients rarely care about the Joomla commercail propriety extention after market.

On the flip side its the perfect reason to get your client to gpl the software he is paying you to make.
You can then reselll only to your other clients too.

In somecases i use the fact that I have done 100 clients to get funding for things I want.
I pitch each of my clients on something I am interested in. Then get 2 - 3 to fund the same thing.
Cost comes down to say a grand each. 

1) User installs your free or commercial extension on their site (lets go for free here)
2) User is not a tech person, just wants it to work and might not understand things (esp in SME)
3) User sees that you offer a wizard service for configuring the software semiautomatically for a fee (either through perhaps back end advertising or on your website where they download it; additionally if you're good with seo you can get in google and it might come up there)
4) User goes to your site and purchases:
4a) I like the service and support model so lets throw in a fixed term support contract to autoconfigure a set of sites with the added bonus that the user can configure a template so that for similar sites the work to configure is even less (now thats value adding++). They might get the option to have a copy of the configuration saved on your server as well for the duration of the contract. This may also be bundled with support forums, better documentation or a premium feature. Further more you may have multiple wizards which are all free.
4b) Pay per site configuration charge. For those doing a one off site this is probably the model for them, in my opinion I want people to go the support route because if they buy a one off deal they're not as obligated to buy again, on perhaps a support contract model they're more likely to see the continued benefit (which means continued payments). This may only cover the use of one wizard (lets say you provide a few) once. In this model be careful because you will have to ensure the configuration does in fact work on the other end or works to a level the user is satisfied. One way around this is providing unlimited runs of the same wizard on the same site in a short period (perhaps a few days or even a week) so that they can keep running the thing until they're happy. Some will want all of that time, some will only run it once. You have to balance the cost of this against that just like you would with a support contract.
5) Now they've paid or been validated they get the option to run the wizard as per the above model. How it autoconfigures their site is really based on a few things and how you integrate it. Running just the pure advanced logic on the server is enough as well (e.g. the data collection component might be pure GPL) and the server keeps track of things based on a users information (pure black box model, the component only has the logic to ask for, receive and process a response).

As previously stated the downside of this model is that when your server is down the service is unavailable. The comment to this is that if your business site is down you're not making money on selling things either so near 100% uptime is the goal but it might take extra hardware outlay to ensure this. On the flipside you're aiming towards regular paying customers which means you can plan for the outlay of resources slightly easier.

My first read through of the idea, would work in my opinion. The technical bit is slightly interesting but not beyond anyone here. That said this in itself is a product: a wizard service for other developers products (e.g. the hosting etc).




Also a rather valid business model. There are going to be organisations who want something specific to them, so perhaps a base extension is something you either offer to buy (or for free) and also offer the ability to do paid extension to it. Something like "Doesn't do exactly what you want? Contact us and see how we can make it so!" Depending on how this is arranged it might 1) be agreed that it should be GPL or 2) that individual might want to keep it proprietary, which is fine because distribution doesn't occur since they own the copyright to it (e.g. they pay you to build it so they own it, again check with your lawyer!).

Remember when you get paid to build something for X, the code is owned by X so distribution doesn't occur. The license in a sense is determined by them.

Heres another concept (again the support model!) where you give your users 'credits'. With these credits they can vote on features or things they want to build. So say your extension doesn't have the ability to instantly Google search something and one user wants it, submits a proposal to get it to do X. You evaluate it and assign it a point target goal (in this case its pretty easy so we give it 20). You basic support client gets 5 credits a month, so for them its going to take them four months to save up for the feature to be coded. But thats fine, because in those four months they're getting all of the other features (like support forums) that you offer. Your premium support client gets 10 credits a month and they think its a good idea (well this month anyway!) and pledges all of their 10 credits on it as well. After the first month we have fifteen credits already, and in the next month the premium support client decides he really wants the ability to load up CSV files from some system and throws the ten credits behind that idea (which is probably at least a 100 pointer but its also more likely to get similar people to vote on it as well). Our basic user votes on it again and we have the required 20 points and the feature gets implemented. As a bonus those who 'paid' for it can get it immediately (esp on the plugin model) but the rest of your user base has to wait for your next release. This way users see advantage in voting on things they want (it comes faster) over sitting and waiting. This could be applied in a co-op model but is perhaps more a per developer/company method.

Keep thinking and sharing!

[edit: not all points need to go to an idea, one could perhaps spend 5 points on five different ideas]

Mistake here. When x person pays you to write software, you can write that software under any licence you "negotiate". The mere act of paying you for it does not define the contract unless you ignore it in which case it could defaults to "work for hire" depending on where you live. That needs to be specified in the contract you have with the client. My contract is defaulted to GPL. Also if you make an extention for Joomla it inherits the Joomla licence so why fight it.

In my opinion your pretty ignorant if you do a work for hire. I have seen developers so desperate for a jobs that they did "work-for-hire" and lost their right to their tools kits that they spent 2 years making. If your doing php development with your own php developed tools, never give a client an chance to own your entire tool kit unless you understand what that means. Most of them say..."so what he wont know how to use it". That really bad thinking. Especially if you ever want to make it a real commercial product.

Here is what happens. You use it in 100 more projects anyway then you get in a fight over something stupid with a client and they start looking for a reason to sue you. If they are shifty and smart they are looking for you to incriminate yourself. If you have a little set of php script or tools you made yourself and you use it in multipule work-for-hire agreements. A shifty smart client could come after you for real damages based on how much you sold all of those site for plus more for what ever wierd stuff they come up with. Also keeping track of tons of differnent licencing agreement you write up quickly becomes very painful. I have seen NDA agreements that say stuff like "damages over and above monitary damages" <<<---- if you ever see this run like hell. That sounds strange but that means a if a client sues you for reusing your work for hire code then they can send you to jail. I have a small collection of wild nda agreements.

This week a client sent me all of the code and documentation for his project. Then asked me to find a c developer to help finish a web application / data collection and hardware control system for field test systems. I went all over town asking the c developers I knew to look at the code to see if they could handle the job. Once I found a few of them and I had finished reading all the code the client sent me an NDA an d confidentially agreement taking all my rights and telling me I cannot even mention the project. I would have automatically been forced to make my self a criminal since I needed to continue contacting 3rd parties on his behalf.  Of course if I don't sign it I will lose that client but better to lose a client then to gain a 200k lawsuit. He needs me WAY more then I need him. 

By choose gpl and no nda agreement you are saying "I refuse to make my self a criminal for using my own software" or talking about my work. You are the programmer here. You are the one with the knowledge to make stuff happen. If you are good at what you do clarify that your not ignorant to the law and that your incriminating your self with agreements like this and dont sign. If they need you that bad that you need to hire your lawyer then tell them they need to pay for your lawyer to review their documentation and hand they your lawyer bill.

Also if you ask people for help when your writing something complicated then you can also incriminate yourself if you sign a confidentiality agreement. ie you need support from a community when your writing code. Posting any code from a project your working on becomes illegal. I know I am good but I am not so good that I never need to post a question about some complex code.

To be a criminal for using software you had to write is unrealistic if you plan to be a consultant for very long.
If you work in the industry for 10 years you will start to see you tool kit build up so be careful not to lose your rights to it and have to start over.

If you have gotten software from a gpl project then maybe you appreciate that gift and want to give back but dont make your own mega project then use those tools under a work for hire because you need 1 months pay.Also beware the "standard confidentiality agreement" or nda "non disclosure agreement" many of these documents include a "work for hire" agreement which can put all your personal projects at risk.

There are some shifty/smart companies down here who pray on young hot shot eager poor developers. They get them to sign insane agreements with promises that they might pay them 150k per year only to hire them for 30-90 days at 50k and take their ideas and source and dump them. Being that I am the php user group organizer I am getting asked those kinds of questions all the time. "Should I sign this?" Typically this is asked of the programer even before an offer letter is written. They get the agreement before they walk in the door with no promise of a job. I tell them to tell those companies that if they sign that the local user group says they will never get them another job again. Then I get a pissed off call from those CEO's because I gave the young developer an major excuse not to sign. I have seen them actually go ahead and hire them anyway. This very situation comes up about every 2-4 months. 

I wont even debate the gpl unless a client brings it up. I am a gpl only shop unless I need a commercial 3rd party extention.
All my code that goes to "web design" clients is gpl. Why? Because if I do a web site for someone and web sites are not their business then I dont want them running around selling my ideas. If I gpl my ideas, they cant box my software and sell it. Worse case the software gets out on the net and the joomla community gets it which is fine by me. I am selling websites not resellable software products.

If someone approches me about a real software "product" I would not pick Joomla for the job but the project would quickly run 20-50k not 5k. I might pick a bsd or mit framework depending on the project. Again be aware of each licence and understand where to use them and when. If you have a special need make sure to reevaluate your licence if you dont remember the specific of that licence. The GPL is not for all situations and all clients but for quick 1 month projects a "web design' client should not change your reasons to use the gpl. So many potential clients so little time.

Learn to quote more then you work and you will find success.
Do not make your self a criminal.
Always write your own contracts and make sure your lawyer reviewed it.
Also assume that the nice guy who wants to hire you is the devil.

Give good service but don't make poor service an excuse to sue you.
You might think the client you got can afford your services only to find that he had just enough for the down payment and he is going to try to find a loophole in your contract so he does not have to pay the second half. That same client will also use any excuse to get his money back if his brother is a lawyer and thinks he can sue in a local court and get a quick settlement. The majority of cases down here in south florida give the client the ability to get his money back for almost no reason.

My current contract is like 20 pages of waivers that my client has to sign every page. Most of the time they look at it and say what is all this. I tell them I have been around the block after 150+ sites. They ask me what it says then I make a joke about it and say "I win you lose". 95% of the time they say "wow you must really know what your doing....". They consider it a badge of experience rather then a bad contract. Out of the other 5% they actually ask to take it home and read it. Some ask for clarification. In a few cases I have giving minor exceptions to the contact but it depends on if I changing something or opening myself up to a lawsuit.

I have seen local developers make websites for $500 bucks and get sued for 15k(county court maximum damages) for lost businesss because a contact form did not work right due to a typo.

Most developers I know save 1000-2000 per month MAX so a 15k suit is almost a years income.
If your only make $500 for a website it most likely not worth the risk your taking.
500 earned is not worth 15k in potential damages.

At this point the lowball designers need to wake up the real costs and raise the prices for custom development.

Be safe!
Paul

Maybe this may a bit 'off topic' what follows, but i have to ask this provocative question:

To explain the background of this question a bit more.

• There is a diferent view of OS here in central europe
• OS is free
• Is OS secure
• Who can/is willing (to) support me
• Because OS is free, why i have to pay for services around

All this points have to be seen from 2 different points of view:

• (a) End customer (i call them here privates)
• (b) Business customer

(a) may know a bit about coding, standards, etc. and is trying to dothe job (support) by himself
(b) may also know, but has his focus on his business - not creating, maintaining, etc. his own website

But both (b more then a) are coming someday and asking me: can you give me support / i need support, can you do that?

Why they are coming to me/my company?

Because i am offering support - main focus on german speaking (Joomla) user.
This started many years ago due the fact that Joomla (and former Mambo) cannot support natively other languages then english.
But the (computer) world exists with more then english.

Due the fact that (a) Joomla cannot really support other languages and (b) many (too many) 3PD extensions are only in english those customers need help in having the whole website (front- and backend) in another language then english (here specially german).

And exactly this is what i am doing.

And because of that work, i have to ask - and now i am coming back to the question - can this be true that you have to pay in the meantime for many extensions, but if you look into the code (does no matter if paid or ferr sw) sometimes you may think this was written by an 14-year old youngster learning php.

Of course, some of those developers are offering 'support' - you have to pay.
Of course, some of those 'vendors' are offering other services (very popular is hosting with 100gig for 1 Euro, etc).

Could it be, that - too - many extension are only made to promote such those 'side' services?
Could it be, that some extensions are only made to make profit - but in no relation with the price you have to pay for?
Could it be, that some developers are only offering an (buggy) extension and afterwards giving support only if you pay for it?

But what if - like we had last year with those secutity issues - the customer gets in troubles, because the developer of this extension is not avaliable anymore?
Or not willing anymore to support?
Or raised his fees in dimension he is not willing to pay?
Or - much simplier and to verify each single day - offers support (for free) but is not answering for weeks?

Why - also - should the customers trusting in this (OS) scene?
Why should they trust in me?

They trust in me, because i can offer them a package with several levels (starting with a per hour basis until a full service with complete monitoring and backup as well as upgrading).
They having a partner which can be asked many (sometimes too many) hours the week before troubles may arise.

We are offering a complete service/solution with consulting (if needed and paid around the clock) from the start on.
We consult him and suggesting/offering him the best package (of extensions we know they are working or have been already reworked by us).

No need for him to waste the time in asking questions in forums.
No need for him to look around and test, etc. ...
He has one single point of contact.

So, i am not offering extensions which you have to pay for, i am only offering services with/around Joomla.
And - as i can see and assume - supporting Joomla/3PD will not ending for many years .....
Does really no matter if GPL or another license ....

Spot on the mark, and an incredibly well written post. Hence why I put in a sense because a lot of agreements by default give them complete control but if you have a well written contract to begin with that states the license (perhaps that everything will be GPL) then for the most part things should be fine and clear (especially when you're using GPL). As you said there are lots of pitfalls and dangers with work for hire style arrangements especially when you're not doing clean room work for each person. This is where the GPL can help to also protect developers as well.

Great post and also nice to see someone not complaining about being told to consult a lawyer

Honestly this post came from someone who is tried of dealing with potential lawsuits becuase he choose to write code independently rather then work for a big software company who can protect him.
I live in fear of my own clients!!!! Sad! I am totally against the idea that my typos can make me liable for insane money. Or for that matter Joomlas typos. All the lawsuits I know of locally charged the guy who lost way more then the individual typo was worth. And of course the next developer who your bad client works with will always side with the person paying his bills.

I have gotten projects that clearly deserved to have the developer sued and I told that new client if they sued I would not agree to take the project. Again help your fellow coder but free your code so we can all help each other earn more. If you make a bad ass commerical app you could sell that app for 5k to 10 clients and make more then by selling it for 50 bucks to each of us. This is a team effort on the part of small web design companies and I think sometimes everyone around here is afraid to admit it. If you cant figure out how to make money with Joomla then you just dont want to work, those people are looking to sit back and collect a paycheck from the rest of us.

After the .com fall out I learned I could not trust the big companies and that the only way to support yourself without major risk is to have 20 clients and not 1. Anyone else here lose 200k in stock options because the company you worked for had its ceo's cash out for 5 billion dollars? CEO's dont care about you. They are looking to make multi millions of dollars on most peoples backs. So if your in the web design worlds its becasue 1 you dont want to work for someone else or 2 you dont have enough skill to.
Either way this community needs to work together to figure out to to help make each other a living or we all risk losing that.

Also as a single developer Joomla has giving me the ability to deploy high quality FUNCTIONAL sites. With uncompairable freedom and simpliciy in templates. If I could show everyone here all the junk websites that people bring to me you would understand. There are a ton of php developers who dont use content management systems and they give clients junk because they are afraid of things like joomla. Because I run miami php user group, I get every messed up php website in south florida pass by my desk. The average website is so bad its not even funny, I don't know who these people are or who taught them to code. Sometimes I feel really bad for them and it was such that simply someone did not know about all the open source options.

No way will I risk any lawsuit or place my self in the line of fire. I wrote that post above because sometimes people around here don't get it. The gpl is what is saving you from getting into piles of lawsuits. Why would you not want that protection? This is web design not rocket science!!!!! Your putting yourself at real risk once your client can point at you and say "You wrote it, You pay to fix it". Clients can sue you for bugs in Joomla if your not careful. So by relicencing it under gpl they have "No Warrenty". Your intention is to safe guard yourself and provide quality work not to put yourself in the line of fire. How will it look in court when you need to argue that? I have worked on a few large projects. One 40k One 70k. When the numbers get that big you want gpl.

As a small developer you cant handle the loss if 1 project backfires. I have seen no less then 20+ projects backfire on local developers. I have even been called in to fix them. Its easy and tempting to under quote or commit yourself to those projects that seem to have no fixed scope. I found it helpful to in most cases stop taking projects with poor scope defination and go with simple projects for slightly higher then average prices. I have seen people take on huge no scope projects for less money then I have charged for a single Joomla site. Be very upfront with clients. Always warn them about risks. Always be as safe as you can.

No one is ever physcially hurt by what code I write but clearly 1 mistake in 1000's of lines of code can cause me to lose everything that I put in years to save. We the community are a team. For the most part we are a team of web design companies. Rarely will anyone who is not doing web design bother to learn all the complexitys of Joomla to the point of making quality sites.

Any one here who wants to and who does not lowball their prices can make a dam good living. And when every other person I speak to says they want a website its like selling hot dogs in a baseball park. So why sell more for less or endanger yourself. The mass populate needs so much help that we will have work for the next 5-10 years. The only thing we need to do is get everyone using a multi pronged system so that no one person is depending 100% on the sale of 1 extention. You need to have multipule sources for your income.

Team right?

Heya, definitely team from me!

Ok cool so I guess the question is.
If your doing web development with Joomla what are you selling and what are people buying.
Then how can we find ways to share stuff that these clients want to buy and share reccomend what the product should cost to an end user.

We should share more info about how much we charged for specific things. Then people might stop selling stuff for 5 bucks when they see someone else charge 50 grand.