Hey I wrote that :)

I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.

For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work, interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked and the page is still up!

Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and mothers.

Company I worked for wanted a new public website. In the end they paid over 3 million for a Drupal theme. Impressive waste of time and money.

Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).

I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?

TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.

(2019)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386