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My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

Comments
  • 1
    i still remember the beginning of the story
    https://devrant.com/rants/1554412/...
  • 2
    If you're concerned that your client might bail out, you should require him to pay for the proportional amount of your work that's already done.

    Also, you should be able to block your client from having access to the source code until he pays you. If you've already gotten 10% of your billing, then he gets 10% of the product.
  • 1
    @tkdmatze haha. I remember your replies, but well here we are now.

    Since he is my relative, this work is might affect personally and my other family members judge me for it.

    I kinda heard one of family member saying "giving a chance to me" as if I was begging for this work.

    I also came to know one of my aunt had trash talked behind my back because in Google Maps the route shown from a bus stop to the hotel was wrong. That's not related to what I'm doing at all!

    Some non-dev works are slowly creeping too. I need to get done with this asap.
  • 1
    @ethernetzero yep, once the work is live in server, I'm gonna ask for full payment before touching it again. Also gonna set boundaries for the work I do.
  • 3
    You seem like an intelligent fellow who got suckered into doing work for an asshole relative who is transparently taking advantage of you. It's time to put some pepper on the gloves and be brutally honest with him. Don't waste one more moment of your time getting jerked around!
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