| The next part is to set the price for the job. Usually I would say: Ok, data scrape will cost you $75. That's still ridiculously low by any measure. I wouldn't take you seriously at that price point. Because, here is why: I was charging that much 5 or 6 years ago. How about $7,500 for manual data scraping? On a related note. A friend of mine asked the other day if I can develop for him a GPS/Google maps solution that would take 6 months to develop for a serious Full-Stack developer. He works on a multi-billion dollar company but he wants the solution for himself to show off his productivity to his bosses. He wants it on a "$50" budget. I'm guessing you have fallen at the same scenario where the lady is paying it from her pocket instead of big corp bank account. |
I had done this a few times in the past and would routinely charge just $100 for scrapes because I had written a robust enough application that the actual work involved (creating a manifest file) took about 5 minutes. I was attempting to work at scale.
Eventually I just got sick of oDesk. I had a regular job and was just looking for beer money anyway and the vast majority of jobs were essentially content stealing for some half-assed SEO purpose. I'd ask people if they'd read the TOS of the site in question and that's when communication would stop. Or they'd come and say "how about $15" and then I would quit communicating.
The lesson is good here - this site (and others like it) are filled with cheap, low-skilled programmers and clients with iffy intentions.
I'll also say that "5 star" doesn't mean much on this site. Reputation is established not by merely having a good aggregate score.