Show IH: Unlimited Web and App Development for a small fixed monthly fee
Hello all!
We launched Devy.io three weeks ago and since then we didn't stop for a second. We basically offer unlimited web and mobile development for a fixed monthly fee.
I truly believe that we are offering a great service that people gladly pay the small price as it helps them a lot in their own businesses.
I'm right here in case you got any questions, and I hope I can contribute as much as I can to this wonderful community!
Alright it says message us for some example projects. But we are already talking here so maybe you could post some examples of what work is suited for this service :)
Have you read the book from the wpcurve founder? Probably super relevant for you.
Also is your business focused on a specific tech stack like theirs was?
No I haven't. Thanks for the tip, I will check it out!
I like this idea and I might use your services in the near future, I'm sure it will succeed (if not, you will have a good experience for the future!) :)
Awesome, really glad to hear that :)
If I need 75 hours of professional web development done on my stack, can I have that for $179/month?
We are not a freelancing service and so we don't count hours. You give us a task and we deliver it as fast as possible.
If you need a specific request or workflow (like ammounts of hours) that would fall under the pro/agency plan where we would reach an agreement that would be beneficial for both parties. The 179$ plan is for what we call personal use.
So for a Portuguese Programmer you they would need to have about 10 clients per month or 3-4 projects for an indian Developer. Yea maybe it can workout, all depends on that how much work each one gives you.
How do you handle the charge? Let's say 10 companies subscribe at the same time and each ask 2 tasks for the day after. How and what do you do?
We are ready to handle more than 10 new signups at the moment. But you don't decide that you want something done for tomorrow, we will work on it and deliver when ready, the time depends on the task and we always strive to be as fast as possible. We have priority plans that you can subscribe to if you really have the need to have your projects delivered sooner.
Yeah for sure maybe not the day after but you got the point.
What's you workflow and tech stack at the moment?
We are using just a simple static site on a VPS.
We use Cloudflare as a CDN and Paywhirl for payments (which they also use Stripe).
For task requests we use a mix of Trello and JarHQ. Email and Skype for conversation and questions.
Thanks for your anwsers. Did you talk to @Vinrob? He's running a similar service but for designs.
Yes! I was actually inspired to start this business because of him :)
Bit of a cheeky question but which HTML theme did you use for the site?
The theme is called Exclusivity - Free Bootstrap 4 One page template, but we are currently working on our own custom one.
Is your hope that people will keep paying the monthly fee even when they don't have work? Is it something like paying for having on-demand developers waiting there for you
Yes we expect some clients to keep subscribed even if they don't have a huge workload for us all the time, they just know that they can count on us to give us tasks anytime and we will take care of it. That type of costumer helps us keep these prices :)
I'm not sure if this is sustainable. I can see people taking advantage of the 'unlimited' part. What if I want to create a new website from scratch, it would only cost me $179, since 1 month is a good timeframe to have that completed in. So i'd pay 1 month, ask you to do the work, and then leave.
The devil is in the details.
In reality, with these services, you're not paying for unlimited anything. You're basically paying a retainer at a really low price, which means you don't get any control over quality or delivery.
You're allowed to submit unlimited requests, but the delivery will be decided by them.
Their profit can come from several angles, including outsourcing to cheap devs (e.g. Upwork) that they've field-tested and who can do the work "well enough", and relying on companies who will continue to pay the retainer over longer periods of time even if they don't always have requests.
Since they control delivery, they could take 6 months to deliver a 2-week project and require you to pay for all 6 months otherwise they won't continue to work on it.
Correct except we would never do that as we actually like to have customers :)
A happy client will bring more clients, equals more profit than retaining one or two unhappy clients.
I'm happy you have this attitude, but remember that the math of your business model disagrees with this statement.
More clients in your model don't equal more profit. Your profit comes from how much you can extend delivery time, and the amount of extended delivery time per task.
If your business is only about growing with perfect efficiency, your business model fails because it can't continue to scale up sufficiently to profit.
In order to run a profit, the costs need to be lower than what you're being paid for a task. You increase income by delaying delivery (and being paid more for one task) or by hiring cheaper devs (which you can't do: at $3 to $5 per hour for HTML/CSS development via Upwork - which is usually half garbage but "good enough I guess" - you won't find cheaper).
If you truly want to deliver on time without intentionally delaying to increase your profits ... you would run your company at a loss.
So you're not looking for 1 happy clients which add 2 happy clients, which each add more happy clients. Your job is to increase the delay of delivery per task to its limits (lose a few clients, keep a few, figure out the right ratio) and hunt for clients who don't mind paying for delayed delivery (or paying while you're not doing any tasks).
I believe there's a valid business model in there, with more opportunities especially for upselling, but we're on IndieHackers here - not reddit. So I hope you don't mind me being very open about how this all works. Fellow IH aren't targets in my eyes.
Thank you for your feedback! We actually did some testing with the pricing and found this price to be sustainable!
This is all within reason, of course, you can't ask ask for 540 tasks for tomorrow and expect them to be done :) But we will do them as fast as we can, and yes, we will do a website for you in way less time than a month.
Building out an MVP could take 1 dev 4 weeks at 40 hours per week of work.
Say I wanted to build a clone of IndieHackers, using laravel and vue, how could you justify building something like that? Do you use talent from USA or is it all outsourced to India/cheaper labor countries?
Our service is perfect for small to medium tasks. If you want something bigger like a custom built from scratch website, it's going to take a bit longer than if you hired your own dev, but quite cheaper.
Our devs split their time between costumers. Our devs are all remote, including from Portugal and the UK.
I think you should list a few example tasks on your website because, from what you can gather from this thread, some people are confused as to what they can ask you to do.
Thank you for your feedback. We have a few examples on the FAQ sections, but I admit that we must work on a few use cases :)
How many developer do you have?