Redefining Freelance Coding: Is 'As A Subscription' the Future?
Recently, I've noticed a growing trend in the 'As A Subscription' service model across various platforms, including here on Indie Hackers. It's intriguing to see traditional services transforming into subscription-based models, and it got me thinking – what does this mean for the future of freelance coding?
In a world where everything from music to groceries is just a subscription away, I ponder the scalability and viability of this model in the realm of coding. Can coding, typically project-based and contract-driven, adapt to this subscription model?
This question led me to experiment with an idea - 'Developer As A Service.' Think of it as a fusion of freelance flexibility and subscription convenience. My aim was to complement my 9-5 day job with coding projects, but without the binding contracts typical of traditional freelancing.
But here's the twist – it's not just about filling in the gaps. It's about offering a reliable, on-demand coding service that clients can tap into as needed, much like they would with a software subscription.
The challenge is in balancing scalability with personalized service. How do you maintain that one-on-one client relationship that's so vital in freelance work, while also offering the 'tap and go' convenience of a subscription?
I'm curious to hear your thoughts:
How do you see the 'As A Subscription' model fitting into the freelance coding world?
What challenges and opportunities could this bring for indie developers and clients alike?
Looking forward to an enlightening discussion!
Of course, if you want to see how I'm pitching/pricing this, feel free to check out my own project on https://dev-on-tap.co.uk
Hey Jamie - I have done something similar but on a much smaller scale. I have had customers who kept me on retainer for 10 to 20 hours/week and it worked really well.
I wish you the best and I look forward to hearing more about your journey!
Very kind words, thanks for your support!
This sounds like a nice idea, especially since a lot of design and product as a service popped up the last few months.
What I, as a developer, can't wrap my head around is, if a customer wants a bug fixed for example, how much time do I invest in that if I just get a predetermined fixed amount per month, without it being not worth it for me.
I would be willing to give this a try as well. How do you get our customers?
To be honest, you don't have to accept every client. As per YC's mantra, I'm doing something that doesn't scale. If this works effectively and I end up getting more clients than I can deal with, then I'll have to either change the way I'm working or hire devs to help.
However, most of time, features can be pushed out relatively quickly. This service is for new feature, not bugs however. Maybe I'll consider a 'bug' addon to it? Also could consider 'QA' addons as well.
Doing this for features only makes sense. If there's a bug with a feature in the future (let's say in a month) then I could imagine it being quite hard to say "This is not part of my service" or "You need to pay extra for that". But I guess then you bite the bullet and deal with it in a customer favored way.
Yeah its on a case by case basis - If I can fix a bug in 10 mins or an hour or something, then I will. No need to charge an extra £1000 a month for that lol
Yeah! this is the approach. I completely agree with you. I'm not developer, want to know abc of this big industry. I recently started learning WordPress and designed my first blogging website. I want guidance from you genius peoples.
We launched TaskerArmy.com this year to fill in the gap you are mentioning for Shopify-related tasks (each task up to one hour). 60K YTD and we have a few customers on a waiting list. All current customers have been acquired with SEO.
That's awesome - congrats!
Great job, Jamie! This is a fascinating article, especially delving into how 'As A Subscription' service models will shape the future of freelance coding. It's amazing to see the shift this kind of model is creating across platforms! Well done.
Honestly, there’s no good reason not to try. Some people are more successful than others. I believe is all how you market yourself and your service. You can try the producticeyourself course.
The 'Developer As A Service' model you propose is in line with changing consumer demands. It is difficult to strike a balance between scale and personalised service. Examining its effects on independent developers' and clients' relationships is exciting.
Awesome.
What you’re describing is a productized service.
I launched and managed a portfolio of those in my previous job. The most successful one had > 600k customer and makes > 6Mio €/month.
You can essentially pull this off with anything that has recurring demand.
My unsolicited but humble advice is, think of it like an insurance you’re selling or a gym membership. A productized service is best when many people buy and few people use it.
You go with three price tiers and people will mostly buy the middle one.
I saw you are offering „unlimited“. The point of these services is to put some limit behind it, otherwise you’re a body-leased external employee, not a product.
You make these more profitable if you understand what’s recurring business and you source that out make it cheaper.
I hope this adds some value to your life. If not, feel free to hate me. I like what you’re doing. Much success with it.
Interesting view!
Yeah I've had a little poke around IH just now and saw a few other people offering this in the last few months. Honestly I had no idea other people were doing this!
How would you limit instead of the 'unlimited' approach?
If other people are doing it, it’s not a bad but a good thing. View it as free market validation. :)
The question in regards to the “limit” is connected to a) what provides value to your clients b) what is giving you an opportunity to increase profitability.
One way that is common in these type of product categories is to limit the amount of requests a customer can make at a time.
You handle only one feature request at a time. You could also e.g. limit the amount features.
This is overall better to determine if you actually niche down. Let’s say you’re focusing on dev services only for website, you could limit it to the amount of landing pages that one can request a month.
If you say: limited to 10 landing pages, likely one customer will ask for 10/10 each month and another one will sporadically ask for 1 or 2/10. That’s how you become profitable.
The low maintenance customers are paying for the high maintenance customers. 😄
I am sure it's a great idea. I have also built a webflow development agency(https://wegems.co) as a monthly subscription service. Before building the agency, I was already implementing a similar approach with a client, and it's been working great for me so far. In discussions with another client (referral client), it's almost confirmed.
But I want to scale it, and I am curious about the outreach methods people use to acquire more clients.
Glad to hear you've had success with this
I've been thinking about this since I saw designjoy.com by Brett Williams.
In my freelancing experience, every client uses a different set of technologies. Despite being an efficient coder, it usually takes me a few days to a week to completely understand a project. How do you deal with this? Do you only take on clients who use the tech stack you're familiar with?
I guess the key is to specialize heavily in a specific technology to be very efficient and able to reuse code. However, this reduces the number of potential clients. But considering what you charge per month, you don't need many clients to be profitable.
How is it going so far, and where are you advertising it besides IH?
PS: I'd be interested if you need extra devs
Tbh I only through about this last night - didn't even realise other people were doing it!
Only just started advertising on a few different places but I'm not expecting this to be a huge part of my life, just a bit of extra pocket money to compliment the day job.
I am indeed planning on being specialised, but if the client requires work in an area that I'm not experienced or confident in, that I'd certainly contact some friends to share the work out and partner up.
I think it's a good idea but there are big problems. If five clients need important fixes at the same time, and each fix takes days, it's tough to manage. Also, each project has a different codebase, and it can take days just to understand how things work in each one. For me, working on several projects at once isn't a good idea. Plus, if a client's project is so small that they can't hire a full-time developer, it's probably not very profitable.
Right now I am trying a little bit different idea: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/revolutionizing-freelance-development-justonedevs-community-driven-model-688b4cec9f
Sounds like productized service. Been hearing a lot about it but not sure how to begin. Any advice would be appreciated
There seems to be a space for productized services of all kinds right now. As with any kind of biz, focusing on a niche might deem better results than an out-of-the-box general coding service, but it sure seems promising.
While not on the coding space, I launched a CSaaS or content strategy-as-a-service myself (copybase.co) and the main challenge today is finding the right pricing structure that balances reliable delivery and quality of service at the same time. Go too low and you compromise immediate service quality, go too high and you (might) compromise on service demand, although the later surely depends on your target audience.
Yeah that's fair - I wanted it high enough to get away from those with low budgets, but it's still lower than my standard day rate because I plan on having multiple of these customers, and its only meant to fill up evenings/weekends with an occasional bit of day working to be honest.
That makes sense. Do you have any systems in place to scale things up or you'd like to keep this a one-man service?
Initial plans are to keep it as a 1 man band, but if I get more customers than I can deal with then I'll hire some people to help out
It's an interesting idea. Mostly wondering if it's working for you?
Thanks - only really published it in the last day so too early to say yet.
I'll give it a month of pushing then will repost in January with results, but expecting slow traction due to Christmas
Recently, there has been a rise in developers offering their freelance services as a subscription. However, these services often lack any significant difference from traditional services, except for the way they are hired.
In contrast to design services offered as a subscription, software development is a much broader and extensive field when presented as a productized service. Software development as a subscription can comprise a wide range of disciplines, including frontend, backend, mobile, full-stack, AI, etc. But is it possible to offer all this while ensuring fast and high-quality results?
To maintain fast and quality results, it is crucial to minimize development uncertainty. However, this becomes challenging when aiming to provide a flexible service to solve the needs of each client. After all, what would be the purpose of offering these services without speed, quality, and personalization for each client?
At tappr.dev, we address all these concerns and offer a personalized mobile application development service of the highest quality and speed. But how do we achieve this?
We specialize in a specific type of development: mobile apps for iOS and Android. This specialization allows us to become experts in this niche and provide unparalleled quality and support to our clients.
We exclusively develop projects from scratch and do not integrate with any other client development teams in a traditional manner. If our clients already have an app, we rebuild it within a few weeks and continue to improve it from there.
We have automated all repetitive processes and boilerplates, enabling us to focus exclusively on implementing the business logic and interfaces that set our clients apart. We can develop any screen or flow, integrated with the UI and design guidelines of each platform, within a few days. We also deliver it ready to use from our clients' devices, and the client can confidently publish the result to the app stores at any time.
We make the most out of technology without it posing a risk to our clients. Our expertise in development and technology should guarantee that we make the right technical decisions, eliminating any vulnerability for our clients. It is our responsibility to handle such matters. Additionally, we stay updated with the latest news and requirements from mobile platforms and application stores.
We perform automatic testing for all logic and business flows, resulting in releases with almost zero bugs continuously. In the rare event of a bug, we can fix it swiftly, making it available for the client to publish within a few hours. How could we not include bug fixing within our services? That wouldn't be professional.
Finally, we have crafted a simple platform that facilitates asynchronous communication with our clients, maximizing productivity for both parties. Through our platform, the client only needs to provide information about their business requirements, while all the technical details are handled seamlessly by us.
All these points allow us to offer a software development subscription of exceptional quality, providing our clients with great satisfaction and with zero interest in returning to their previous providers.
We firmly believe that software development should be an opportunity for our clients, whether through a subscription service or the conventional model, rather than an extra burden.
...thanks for the ChatGPT advert?
If you think my comment is ChatGPT generated maybe you didn't took the time to fully read it.
Do you think the points outlined don't make any sense for a software development as a service offering? Or better, that ChatGPT would be able to generate this content by itself?
Probably that's the level in the software development as a service scene. It's scary seeing comments saying they won't fix bugs. I think there is not much care about customers and providing the best service possible. Just aim to relatively high MRRs with a couple of customers.
Precisely, the service that you have "advertised" to us doesn't share any of the points I mentioned.
Alright bud - I'm not the one who turned up to someone showcasing their new business concept just to post a blurb about how that idea is awful, and why your business is better with a link to your own site. No need to be disrespectful.
I saw a post you wrote on reddit offering Tappr.dev as a 'Top-quality Android and iOS app development as a service' - is this not the exact same thing that I'm offering and the exact thing that you're criticising in your comment?
Question - Why does Alex Reynolds not exist online anywhere, nor does Tappr.Dev present any company address in any capacity on any platform (your own website, linkedin, TOS, PP, Threads, Twitter)? Why does there exist no digital footprint for Tappr.dev past the last month, or any reference to your username anywhere either? Are you a mysterious anonymous ghost? xD
You were the one "curious to hear your thoughts" so I shared my team ones. Now I can see it wasn't a genuine statement. I didn't even add a link to my own service, just mentioned that we were applying those concepts there.
I already shared how we're managing our service, so draw your own conclusions about whether it's the same as yours.
I'm not going to get into the rest of your toxic comment (it would be great if we could have a conversation about the topic of the post instead), but I want to answer to your accusations and hopefully be helpful to someone else too.
tappr.dev currently has 3 active clients coming from our previous freelancing gigs, so we're still operating as a self-employed entity. The new company legal entity will be available soon (and our new clients will be working with it). We just didn't wanted to share our personal information and addresses right now. The web has been published very recently indeed. We never hided that for obvious reasons.
On the other side, not a very social-media guy myself nor my teammates, so I created my indiehackers and reddit accounts a few weeks ago with a new username (that includes my full name, by the way). I just wanted to share our journey and help and learn from others.
Now I know creating fresh accounts and not sharing our personal info was the best choice. You never know who may be doing suspicious research on the Internet.
Hello, I am Anand. Founder and CEO of PieSocket realtime, I also run a software studio called CodeBihar.
I have been trying to use this model since last month and everytime it turns into an hourly contract because (a) client does not need my services fulltime or (b) charging per hour for fulltime roles pays me more.
I will still try to make it work for the income predictability it brings along for my team.
Interesting - Is this because you take payment at the end of the month instead of the beginning? I'm planning on this being a 'pay in advance for 1x month's worth of development effort' kind of thing.