Give IH: Idea for Unlimited Development-as-a-Service
I've seen a number of "subscription to unlimited design" companies the last couple years...
i.e. Pay a recurring $X00/month. Get access to a "design resource" that you treat as your own in-house designer. Not for big projects; but for updating banner ads, small website tweaks, perhaps a landing page, etc.
Now... What about development? What would "subscription to unlimited development" look like?
Not for big projects; but for very small features, updating button copy, tracking down exceptions, etc.
I know what you're thinking... There's no way this could work! Software has unlimited bugs. A "very small feature" is not a thing. And you're right. It's a crazy idea. And therefore possibly a non-obviously-great one!
Thousands of applications are released everyday. Often created by freelancers, design, or development agencies for clients who have no in-house technology team. My first business was a "boutique development studio", where I released dozens of green field projects over the course of several years, and could have seen a "trusted maintenance as a service" provider be very valuable in several contexts.
Perhaps there's a way to make this tractable... Focus on a particular vertical like Django, Rails, iOS, etc. Only support applications which have web server + DB and nothing more complicated. Carefully delineate what's included in the service. Offer different SLAs for different price points. Affiliate payments to development studios for new business.
Could be really useful, and I haven't seen it done before. I doubt I'll tackle this myself... so it's yours for the taking!
I like that you immediately acknowledge all the possible problems with it, that shows that you're not naive about it.
My main issue from a programmer standpoint is that it's not scalable. The number of clients will more or less directly correlate with the amount of work you have to do. So there's a definite upper level.
I'd also be concerned about mental burnout with an idea like this. You will repeatedly work on small "fixes" and "improvements" across many projects, none of which you have a deeper involvement with. Clients can also be very unpredictable and constantly ask for work which isn't covered.
When you say "trusted maintenance as a service", does that also mean web server maintenance? As a solo developer I'd definitely stay away form that. Imagine you are responsible for the uptime of 50 different websites on different infrastructure which could fail at any time. There might also be a big liability concern.
I do think that with the right approach you can do something great in the space. Just make sure you don't position yourself as a commodity and charge a 10th of what you could be charging.
To ensure the reason for my original posting is clear... I'm not planning to start this business. The idea randomly came to me today. It didn't personally appeal, but I do think it has an interesting and useful kernel, so I thought I'd post as "Give IH" to perhaps spark someone else!
My doing this was inspired by Josh Levine's recent "Idea Dump" (See https://wp.josh.com/2018/02/11/idea-dump-2018/).
Also, I just discovered these forums last week, and would love to participate to make them a great place. Many people struggle with finding an idea. Other people have too many ideas. Sharing ideas tends to beget more ideas. So... I'm thinking it would be helpful (and multiplicative!) to give away any good ideas that I'm not planning to use myself!
W.r.t to the idea... you make many good points. As with any idea, you'd need to find some vector through the challenges.
p.s. I was born in Vancouver and grew-up in Kitsilano. But have since move to London.
I'm sorry if it felt like I was criticizing you. That wasn't my intention. I only meant to point out some possible problems I saw with the idea itself.
It's a great thing to share ideas with the community and we should have more of it because we can all benefit from the discussions that follow.
Regardless, in the end many ideas don't seem great until someone gets it right and as entrepreneurs we have to see beyond everybody who says that it sounds silly.
p.s. growing up in kits must've been great! I'm from Germany and have lived here for 2 years now.
Don't worry - I didn't feel criticised at all! I liked your analysis. Just wanted to be clear the idea is for anyone's taking.
I'd like a "dev ops as a service". I think a lot of solo developers are likely not that great at managing infrastructure and could use a reasonably price service that took care of that mess for them. There are a few like this https://www.reactiveops.com/devops-as-a-service/, but 15k per month is too high for the amount of work I'd actually need.
Over the years I've had to basically become a sysadmin to manage stacks for my clients. I'm building an infra-as-a-service product to productize what I've had to do for them (i.e., AWS setup, auto-deployment, auto-scaling, etc.). It's all built on AWS for now, but is this something you'd be interested in beta testing? If so I'd love your feedback! Price point starts a lot lower because it's all automated.
I'd be up for it, but I'm on Google Cloud currently and there'd be quite a bit of work to move over to AWS. Good luck though!
Thanks! I'll send you a note! The end goal is to be cloud agnostic, so I've been building it to easily add different backends, but since you're the first to request GCP I'll give it some extra points in the TODO list ranking. :)
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Thanks! That's way more reasonable, but still on the high side. I would consider that when I'm a little further along.
I've seen a few of these around for WordPress – e.g https://wpcurve.com/ – but not other stacks... seems like the model is quite popular so you could give it a try?
Sounds like a great way to package what’s essentially a retainer contract for development services.
Absolutely - it's a riff on the classic retainer.
With the constraint that you'd do zero feature development. Enabling you to focus solely on achieving economy of scale in the "necessary maintenance" of tons of applications all written on the same software stack.
A key point being that the original development agency wouldn't "lose" their client by using your service. You'd simply "maintain" the project until the client is ready to pay the agency for the next round of lucrative feature development work.
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Haha nice - yeah!
They don't list scope on their site. Which you'd need to constrain in some way... I was thinking more along the lines of "maintenance" to existing applications which were expensive up-front.
This feels really weird.
I get unlimited web, ios and android development for $359 a month?
As a developer that feels so wrong on every level. Assuming an hourly rate for the dev of $35, which isn't much. That would be 10h a month split between web android and ios. If I wanted a simple android and iOS app from them which would take one dev two weeks to build per app (80h), it would take 160h.
At 10h/month we're looking at 16 months (which would cost me $5,744) for those apps.
This leads to the next problem. The devs who offer this service can either outsource the work for even less money, half-ass the job or work themselves into burnout to provide a decent product.
It says they're based in Portugal, and average wages are quite low there compared to most places. If they had ten customers they'd be able to pay three devs a bit higher than average for the country, and assuming the average customer isn't constantly utilizing their subscription I'd imagine it'd be quite feasible, and overall a luxurious job for the area.
https://tradingeconomics.com/portugal/wages
You're right, their wages are significantly lower. According to glassdoor the average software dev in Lisbon gets $16 USD an hour. This would get me 22h a month and my app scenario would then take 7 months and cost me 2.5k.
If they are good at what they do, they could easily charge 2-3x that amount.
I'm from Portugal but living in Germany(soon to be Norway). Quality isn't known to be the best, the good ones leave/freelance because no good dev works for the wages there. Rent in Lisbon costs the same as any EU capital. In fact, I pay less rent in Düsseldorf than I did in Lisbon, with ~5 times the salary.
This pricing model assumes companies don't request much work, similar to how gyms make money: 1000 people pay every month, but only 100 actually show up. Except in this case, it's too easy to request work.
My company does offer something similar, except it's not publicly advertised, and we sell X hours per month of dev/maintenance/marketing/devops. For now I take care of it all but I plan to start expanding/hiring and focusing tremendously on teaching my people to do great work.
Thanks for your insights Amando, it's great to hear from someone who's actually done it.
Have you thought about writing a blog post on IH to share your insights with the community? I'm not personally looking to get into the space but others may benefit from it.
I will for sure write something when it's ongoing for longer and problems have to start being resolved. :) it's too easy when nothing goes wrong!