Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Even your description sounds ambitious in that time.
And for email its not just outlook, gmail has its on set of peculiarities and there is even differences between outlook versions.
Then there is the actual crm. Sending emails and keeping a register of customers is not a crm.
Its just a fancy customer list.
So I expect there are a lot not said in that description or in the customers request so there is a large risk they will not be satisfied anyway.
Make sure to get payed and have everything in writing. -
@Freytag the why is easy ;)
Its fun and someone say they are prepared to pay for it :)
We are developers, do we need more reasons :P
But its important to consider complications like the customer failing do describe what they expect and ending up in a dispute over what was agreed upon. -
I've built several custom CRMs and will borrow some components so the timeline should be fine.
The customer was initially calling it a CMS. I corrected him to CRM.
There are a few details he didn't focus on there. He needs clients, contacts, statuses, notes, cases (instances of his workflow for a client), file management, document rendering from HTML, etc. It'll allow him to keep track of clients from start to finish.
I probably shouldn't have told him it's simple because regardless of how easy it is...it's time consuming. Now he thinks my quote is too high and he's probably getting other quotes. Oh well. The others will quote him lower, do a shittier job, cut corners, and he'll end up paying more for a rebuild or lots of fixes. -
@ethernetzero Surprisingly, his response was "Ok, I understand". I think he's just like "Fuck this guy, I'll go back to Fiverr where I got my first quote for $4,000". I quoted him $3,500 (super low) and I guarantee you I would take care of a lot of shit he wouldn't get with them like setting him up with free SSL, email domain verification, etc. The other devs will probably use PHP mail and spoof the sender. Stupid.
-
@Stebner55 Surprising answer, but you're probably right about what he must be thinking.
hope this isnt a repeat. have a great weekend guys!!!!!
Reality
Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"
My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.
For instance:
Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.
What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.
What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.
Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.
Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.
If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.
I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."
rant
clients suck
client