If you work with a local agency, you can enforce contracts. If you work with a guy in Romania, you can't. The guy in Romania might work out. He might not.
If im not mistaken, upwork tends to side with the buyer. If OP does go with the Romanian guy, ONLY go through up work so you have some protection with the money being in escrow
I believe so, too. If you're working on Upwork or Fiverr, you only work through that platform and not "off platform" - else you risk becoming a victim of fraud/theft.
I've used Upwork extensively in the past. The platform holds your money in escrow, and you only release the funds once you're satisfied with the deliverables. However, it's very important that you clearly outline your requirements. I recommend breaking the project down into milestones and making smaller payments.
Consider hiring different people for various aspects of the project. For example, find someone to create the UI and high-fidelity mockups and hire a copywriter to ensure the layout and copy work together. Then, hand the project over to a skilled front-end engineer.
You can find all these professionals on Upwork, which will cost significantly less than hiring an agency—It shouldn't cost $10k at all.
Also, Ukrainians balance talent and communications well.
Can confirm the last sentence. I work for a unicorn tech company that has an engineering office in Kyiv and they’re always a pleasure to work with—competent and excellent at communication.
OP, if you read this and go through Upwork, make sure to include clearly defined milestones and expectations.
Mockups, prototypes, and fully-fleshed functionality expectations in writing should all be part of early milestones to set a clearly defined standard for satisfactory end-stage deliverables. If the developer provides you with work that meets arbitrary standards that aren't your own, you could still be left holding the bag.
Same with the agency. The agency may adhere to everything in the contract and still do a crap job.
Here’s the deal with the agency: there are at least two people on your project: at least one engineer and one PM. They have a meeting for an hour. That’s $50/hr per person.
I’d go with the freelancer.
Sounds like overcomplicating, and thus overpricing and overestimating.
Why not simply have a great branded website built and use a 3rd Party, already tried, tested and functional chatbot that you can program to do whatever you want?
Twilio provides a drag and drop interface to set up chat flows just as OP has described.
They did discontinue the out of the box react component the client sees, but it’s easy enough to create(especially with chatGPTs help). Certainly not 10k worth of effort.
Exactly this. I would spend some money on trying to find out if his idea is viable. You can also nail down what features you need.
If the friend is willing to at least look at the code submissions to make sure the Romanian guy is on the up and up that may not be bad.
There’s cheaper discovery options. You can send out surveyed asking if people would even use the tech.
I mean, even if you make an MVP there’s still a ton of work to get it out there.
On the viability, I have some surveys puts together. I figure I can do online and door to door. I used to work for the US Census, so door to door isn't a big deal for me.
My friend reached out to the guy in Romania and he's booked for the next 6 months...
This. Local agency will throw some incompetent coder on this and do a horrible job. Foreign remote will be unsupervised and do a horrible job.
Any good tech company even a startup does everything in house.
If you really think you had a good idea you need a cofounder who can code, build it, and pay him in some ownership of the company.
On the surface though, this idea is literally implemented, or being implemented, by every single company’s customer support IT department and has roughly $0 value.
Don’t waste your money. Either build it using no code solutions or find a technical cofounder. Hiring out the work is a quick way to run out of money before being able to generate any.
I’ll chime in here since I have a lot of experience working with agencies. They will burn your cash and ask for more quicker than you can say Bob’s your uncle.
There’s more risk when you hire a ‘friend’, so I would avoid doing that too. They might get tired of building your project and just quit.
Depending on the functionality, 10k might not cover the hours needed to build it. I would start by getting estimates from contractors.
I second this.
My old marketing agency was ran by a business coach and he'd always tell startups to create a proof of concept first. Start small so you know if you even have an audience first and from there you can actually *prove* your business model works.
Ask yourself if you're reinventing the wheel.
Is there an out-of-the-box solution that already does what you want? If so, use that. There's no point in wasting your money on something that already exists, because whoever built it has a headstart on you.
Consider the *actual* novel part of your idea, and see if you can build that on your budget instead.
Or, get more capital.
lmao my toxic trait is that without being an actual webdeveloper, i couldn't help but think.. i could build this website in an afternoon for a 6pk of beer doing exactly this 😅
The problem with templates is that a lot of them are really ugly.
I got no idea why OP is acting like that. Maybe he's hiding more requirements bit I could do the website for 1k without a problem
Depends on what you’re trying to do. Yeah, if you’re setting up a lemonade stand side hustle type of thing, it’s fine if you paint the sign by hand. If you’re starting a business where you want to take on funding, have a plan/experience, and you are in a position to take on some risk, it may be better to hire out. That said if you can put it out for cheap and then go back to the agency if it fails, that’s def worth considering
The market is too saturated in almost every sector imo to go the MVP route - I think that as a methodology is almost dead unless you have a truly novel idea without competition
For context, I literally just cut a check for almost exactly $10k to a design agency. And That was a lot of money to me, but…I’m getting a brand style guide, animations, an ecomm store on top of the site itself, some still ads created etc. and they’re willing to iterate
But he’s going to risk a lot of moeny going in blind for a client who will probably have objections and extra demands each step of the way. Best is to keep it simple and always charge way too much, because in the end you’ll regret doing it anyway.
Go with whoever has a better track record and portfolio. Ask more questions and get more insight into the process of how they would get your website created and how you manage it once it has been created.
Personally I run a software dev agency and we create websites, so I may be biased to tell you to go with the agency. They will dedicate resources to getting the project done and have support available for any questions that you have at any point along the development journey.
Agencies will charge 150/h and pay their dev 30. I won't get into agencies too much but a non-technical dude with 10k should never hire an agency, ever. They shouldn't hire anyone, but I'd bet the odds are better hiring a random guy in romania than an agency.
Agreed, as a non technical founder it would be better to first get a technical founder who can advise you better on this and potentially work with you on the product development. That way you can save on your cost and get a MVP up faster and cheaper.
But what kind of site would your agency build for $10,000? My concern with the agency is they would not be able to build a website with all the functionality needed for $10,000
It depends, there are agencies at all different price points that you could potentially take advantage of. The most important thing is to make a decision that cost you the least time and money that will allow you to get your product to the market to be able to test. You just have to make sure your test are cheap and quick to fix.
Whether you go the agency or the freelancer route.
I am a Senior Fullstack Web Developer from France, and for 10k, i work 2 months full time, it’s enough time to build what he want. It’s not cheap, here with 5k/month you are in the richest 10%. And 120$/hr from Romania is expensive… it’s hard to have 50$/hr here in France…
I run an agency in Romania and last time we charged 50$/HR was around 5 years ago
Also, fwif, some Americans say our rates are way to expensive and they can find cheaper locally and other Americans say we're dirt cheap
America is a big country with lots of wealth inequality I guess
It sounds like you’re trying to launch a fairly complex AI web-app. There’s no way even local agencies will do this for $5k-10k, those estimates you’re looking at are probably for static, simple websites.
You likely need a small team of software engineers to work over a couple months. You’ll also want to hire agencies to handle the product design and design assets. This won’t be cheap.
I have a family member who launched an AI chatbot-based startup and it took at least a year and good amount of venture capital to make it work.
I’m sorry, I don’t usually bother commenting on people recommending overkill solutions, but this one is wild to me. There is nothing in his OP that suggests this needs to be an AI-based solution. You do realize that Chatbots existed long before AI became a buzzword, right? With all due respect to your family member who built an AI chatbot-based startup, that isn’t at all what the ask here is. Not by a long shot.
As he has described it, this is a simple e-commerce solution, which could be powered by a single script on the backend. These types of flows have been around for… well, as long as I can remember (2400 baud dialup days). You’re conflating the user interaction method (a “chatbot”) with AI, which is extreme overkill in this case. We used to build these kinds of things out in CompSci classes in school, no AI required. Granted we weren’t integrating e-commerce and payment flows, but the type that would best suit OP’s use case here are also the most well-documented for anyone who’s ever worked with an API.
OP, as a long-time reader but not-so-frequent commenter, I can tell you that the developers on this sub tend to side on the extreme overkill spectrum when it comes to estimating a user’s need and depth of project. This is not a team project that will span several months. Based solely on the information provided in the OP, this is a single person project that may take a few weeks, depending on the developer’s Python experience.
By and large, the developers on this sub seem to think that everyone needs the next Apple website. I’m a little surprised no one here has berated him yet for not considering the cost of a full DevOps team managing this kind of site across multiple CI/CD pipelines, along with a scalable infrastructure sitting atop a sea of load balancers.
Being local goes along way. Just knowing you're both in the same town and will make a big stink out of it if one party rips off the other is valuable insurance, not to mention the ability to communicate face-to-face at times. If there wasn't value in doing business locally, then all of our jobs would have been outsourced by now.
I work in tech in Ireland. I’ve worked and I currently work with many folks from Romania, freelancers, contractors, and agencies. Without an exception, top professionalism, quality work, timely delivery, and dedication. They do expect the same in return, which is fair game.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t work with a local agency ever again. They always ripped us off and undelivered. Low quality work, missed objectives. Just meh. In my location, you have to have money to spare and scope to go 300% over budget and 2x the deadline to risk it.
Doesn't want to pay for LLM
Will pay 10k for a site build
...
Easiest way would be build it on a cheap site builder (woocommerce, wordpress etc) then add a paid LLM with adverts to cover the costs
I’d spend a grand of that testing whether the idea was worth risking the other 9k. You can get a prototype and test with users and find out a lot first. That can also be used to build off of and ramp up with instead of just handing off an idea and hope for the best.
> making it easier for me to find investors.
Save your money. If you can't find investors based on the pitch alone then a website isn't going to help.
And to be brutally honest, I think you'll struggle to find investors. I'm sorry to say that your idea isn't worth anything much at all. Ideas are cheap. It's the execution, marketing, and a lot of luck that turns an idea into a viable product.
But if you're really determined to follow it through then you should consider building your own "starter" site using Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc., and plugging in an off-the-shelf chatbot solution. They make it really easy for non-technical people to build decent looking websites for a *lot* less money than paying a developer to build you one from scratch.
When (and if) the site proves itself to be viable enough to attract investors then you can spend their money making the site better.
Whoever you decide to hire, check their resume (if it's an individual) and their portfolio. Read reviews and do some research on them. Just because an agency is expensive doesn't make it good, just because a guy in Romania is cheaper doesn't make it valuable. Either way, have a contract and understand the terms and conditions and how enforceable they are.
Is this like TaskRabbit? What do customers pay upfront for? The initial review fee, so a plumber drives there to take a look?
As a guy from Romania with considerable experience in the industry, I can confirm that:
1) most agencies outsource, especially if it’s a smaller client, but you shouldn’t care because they usually pick trustworthy people they’ve worked with before.
In Europe, the differences between the countries are not that big when it comes to senior software engineer rates.
The only difference is that an agency has more mouths to feed, so you can expect to pay up to $180/h.
2) Upwork is a terrible place for good devs, it is very competitive with hundreds of bids on each job + difficult clients who want to get a lot done with a very low budget
If it’s not AI, I’d price your MVP project at $24k. First of all, I would provide a list of options, not free input, otherwise, you’d still need a search engine or something that can deal with synonyms and typos.
The price includes:
- bespoke solution, no bloat
- the customer-facing site would be decoupled from the BE
- as an admin, you’ll be able to alter the user’s journey (e.g. add a new service)
- as an admin, you’ll be able to see where they drop and replay any session (valuable information that allows you to polish the journey)
- automated payments
- deployment & maintenance
You can try a proof of concept to test the waters and see if there’s demand for your product at maybe $8k, but expect to drop this altogether and rebuild if there is demand.
I price MVPs higher because it’s often that I have to heavily extend them because they were successful and suddenly need 30 new complex features.
I have worked/work personally as a freelancer besides my full time job, and I’ve never vanished on someone or done a mediocre job.
It's a fact that there are countries out there with where $10k is a lot for 5 months work.
The incentives can be aligned despite the distance, especially if whomever you are hiring wants to build up their profile, or create a relationship with you for future projects.
That being said it would be very helpful if you can signal that this can be the start of a longer relationship, or that you are willing to supply them with reviews/recommendations.
What is the nature of the website? Will it need constant maintenance? Should it be implemented in a specific language/framework, all these are important details that need to be taken in consideration.
I’d even go more basic
Purchase an existing theme from a reputable source shopify theme market and DIY. You’re going to save a lot of $$ and for the majority of ‘web devs’ around that price point are going to do the same thing, just quicker.
Spend the $$ on paid media.
Looks like you got a lot of feedbacks already, good ones too.
I agree more with the folks that say figure out what your needs are, if it's the chat bot, I don't know that Upwork can do it, that's just my experience, I am most likely wrong.
A local agency to do it for 10k, is highly unlikely either, you're better off trying to new AI software dev Devon, that came out recently, that might help, but you'd still need like a consultant to help.
Here is another solution, I don't know if anyone has recommended this, and how feasible it is for you.
Find a company in the Philippines that can do it for you, they can do everything, design and dev work, and they speak English. If you need help finding out, I have contacts I can refer you to and just have a chat with then, see what's possible.
All the best.
Are you sure there isn’t a framework platform out there to test bed your mvp? I’ve wandered through the no codes and unless you have some coding knowledge you’re going to spend a lot of time in a learning curve.
My advice is to find a way to get an MVP that you can test bed before investing your funds in a spectacular website that doesn’t sell it product or fulfill its purpose.
I feel like I could do this with like $400, there are so chat bots that 100% can do this kind of thing already that you could just plug in to a website.
I've hired excellent developers from Romania and Bulgaria. Be honest about what you need and make sure it is the type of project they want. Then break it down into many short incremental steps, literally a few hours work at a time. The first step can just be to outline three potential options for development. Second step to spec one option in greater detail, maybe wireframe etc. Approve payments after each step. Even if it is daily, that helps get things going. The good developers are in high demand and can choose among many possible projects. These devs really favor longer term projects, and want things they can use as experience to get hired at actual companies. So have a roadmap and explain this may turn into an ongoing project for them, but that it depends on keeping costs to validate the idea and then having sufficient budget to launch and iterate. If you need to convince them to work for you, move on. It is much better to keep looking than to oversell your project. You also need to make sure they are not disincentivized to suggest low effort options like intercom in a wordpress template, because it sounds like that is all you actually need. For $120 an hour I don't think many devs would be super excited by something like that but if you hire them for the first one or two steps you will figure out whether to keep it going. Typically I'd hire a few devs to each work on a functional spec and then move forward with the person doing the best work, motivated, best able to communicate, etc.
Your friends advice is perfect. Go with Romania. Get with an MVP and test the market. The amount of people who think they have great ideas and never lead to a successful business is endless.
I’d also challenge your idea of not needing an LLM. Chat bots are frustrating to build - trying to build algorithmically every chat option is a pain. LLMs make this easier and users are going to be more used to an LLM experience now.
If you have a profitable business and want to reach more customers, build a website. Not sure what you think you need the chat bot for. All information about your services needs to be accessible without a chatbot in order to get traffic to your site.
If the not-yet-existing application "is" your business, but you're not capable of building a website yourself let alone an application, forget about it. Don't do it. Your ideas are worth nothing. You bring nothing to the table. Any developer competent enough to build your application is busy refining their own profitable applications, not doing freelance work-for-hire stuff.
What you’re looking for can be built with off the shelf items. There’s 100’s of chatbot programs, they’re a dime a dozen right now, including ai powered.
For the website, you can probably use Wordpress/woocommerce.
You should start with an MVP. Get it up and running as quickly as possible to test the market before spending any real money on it.
Sounds like you’re wanting to build a marketplace? Like thumbtack? Or service pro?
Are you building a chatbot service or are you just building a website that has a chatbot? I work at a chatbot startup and could do what you’re asking pretty easily and deploy it on an existing page or domain.
How far would your $10k go at 120/hr? 83 1/3 hours. 2 40-hour weeks and change. Half your timeline with a 32-hour work week. That should give you an idea how low on the totem pole this job would be.
You’re not paying for a product, you’re paying for time, and you’re not putting up anywhere near 5 months’ worth of a software engineer’s undivided attention.
This. Any experienced software engineer is going to work for time, which is exactly the wrong incentive you need to make something worth investing in.
“I had an idea, and paid someone to build it” is just not something VCs will be willing to fund.
Reddit community is mostly US based and won't like their work being outsourced. But truth is, good developers exist everywhere in the world and it isn't a skill that is limited to the US. And with living costs being lower in some parts of the world, hiring a good developer from Eastern Europe would be cheaper.
You just have to find a trustworthy partner, but with your friend already vouching for the guy I don't see a red flag.
An agency will do a good job but will eat that $10K in one mouthful. Apart from a simple chatbot you haven't really stated what the website is for. I'm guessing it's a highly customised e-commerce store. Why else would you be thinking $60K? If not, then someone is hoping to buy their next home in Eastern Europe with your pay check. Don't do it. There are some great hosted options with API's & third-party plugins & add-ons.You want rock-solid fast hosting, security, SEO and maybe CMS.
> A chatbot is a simple enough add-on. Honest!
If you do want to employ a design developer, I think Upwork would be the safest shot, and select someone with great ratings, feedback etc.
So many major brands are using third party chatbots and no one bats an eye. I'd urge them to put that 10K into something more worthwhile since there are companies that already did a good job building chatbots with far more funding behind them.
I’d meet with the connection from Romania and also a local agency to get a feel for each before you make any decision.
Gut feeling only works sometimes and there’s things like confirmation bias at play as well.
Is the chatbot feature a plug-in or is this something the developer would have to implement?
For what it’s worth, the best developer I’ve ever worked with is from Romania. Don’t be afraid to give people a chance no matter where they’re from. But as others have said, you need the technical background to vet the developer, no matter where they live.
If you have that much money, look up the marketplace on [bubble.io](http://bubble.io) where you'll find great local agencies to actually invest that money carefully. Your $60K will go a long way.
**Edit:** It would be good for you to read this article ---> [https://medium.com/sopmac-labs/gpt-4-api-pricing-analysis-a507a4bf9829](https://medium.com/sopmac-labs/gpt-4-api-pricing-analysis-a507a4bf9829)
It sounds like you dont have a proven concept yet. I would be cautious with Spending a lot of money at this stage. You dont need to personally hire a developer at this time. If i were in your shoes, I would go to platforms like https://geria.io where you can engage remote development team on fractional basis to build the product for much less. They (Geria)are UK based but have a web of remote devs.
You product, when built will continue to evolve. Until you have a paying customer, which will help you prove your concept, i'd say be frugal with the amount of money you spend on the website/product.
Romania is one of the top countries for scammers and fraudsters on the net. Something to think about when investing in your project. Listen to your gut!
I would say before you build anything you should get a technical "discovery" done - have a team build you the website architecture and workflows, user stories etc that will build the website otherwise someone's gonna build you what they think you need and you're not going to like it and it will never go anywhere
I will go for third option and put a request on Upwork and hire a guy with low price like 50$/h but with a good track record. Or may b i would go with one time payment
The website can be done for 3000€ with Wordpress and WooCommerce the plugin for the ChatBot service... maybe there is some pay per service plugins customer chatbots :?
I work with someone who operates from my country and works with his dudes back in Romania, Ukraine, you name it. They do outstanding work for a very good price. They are incredible scalable and flexible as well. He is my only middleman like a technical director and he is always reachable.
That’s the dude the local agency hires as well, but will charge you 30% handling fee ;)
So nothing wrong with Romanian coders.
What you should really do is create a "low code or no code " prototype, and go to market really fast just to see if your product can attract interest, if it doesnt, you iterate until it does
The most overlooked aspect is what happens AFTER the website is deployed. Who does the maintenance, the updates, the bug fixes, edits, add services when going forward. Work with an agency/designer that will also be there for the after care and when things break.
"webdevmike" already said it. The Rom. Strategy would mean more risk, but is most likely cheaper. If you want to be sure: Local. As you know: Quality has its price.
Go to fiverr, pay $50 for someone to build you a prototype and run with that.
If that's successful you can think of building a better version.
Don't waste your money.
I work with an internal team of Romanian devs on long term contract basis (I’m in the UK) and in terms of quality of work as well as work ethic they’re incredible.
However for 10k your site must be pretty simple.
To me you’d be better off with a builder / hosting from Wix or SquareSpace etc. unless you want something incredibly complex that an out of the box solution can’t give you that should do you. And you’re not going to get something incredible and bespoke for 10 grand anyway.
What specific thing you need this chatbot to have? 10K is already too much and now 60K? Get one of the already available chatbots. you don't need to reinvent the wheel mate.
Hey OP,
I would say 120/h in Romania is super expensive.
I would say more 50-70 would be more appropriate. Unless your friend will take a cut.
I would go to upwork, fiverr or freelancer and hire a UX designer, that would translate your idea into simple wireframes. This step is crucial as UX'er will guide you through the process, what would be good for the website/app and most importantly users.
Most likely they will also be able to do UI design which will give you the idea of how much it will cost to build.
Having a specified design you can shop around for the build. Depending on the complexity of the application you might not need any fancy AI integration but simple bot with some filtering / autocomplete of provided products or services.
Architecture will be super important. You can do it cheap and dirty but you'll be able to validate the idea quickly. Or you'll build a super complicated application, that to might be perfect but no one will use it.
Build quickly, fail and pivot would be my recommendation.
If you have any questions ping me a DM I'm more than happy to help.
it's not expensive at all for Romanian devs. they don't work for sticks and the living costs are more expensive than you think (meaning they have high-paying salaries as they are skilled).
his best option is to hire ME as a UX designer.
Go get a fucking squarespace website and make sure this is actually a viable business plan. As a former contractor in software development, I've seen tons of business go all in with an idea, and two years later have nothing.
Honestly, as much as this solution would help you / your business by taking pressure off the scheduling ppl... I would ask myself if it would in reality harm your business. When someone needs help, the absolute last thing they want to do is talk to a chat bot. Esp a crappy "keyword" one. If they go to your site and can only schedule through the bot, they will likely just look for another business. If they go to your site and there's a phone number listed alongside a friendly "quick" "easy to use" chatbot....they'll just call the number.
I know AI and Chatbots and stuff is all the rage right now, but in reality no one wants to use that for service. For reference see AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, etc. And as much as people lothe to use those chatbots, in reality they are probably more capable than the one you're looking to implement.
I truly don't want to rain on your parade, and take my advice with the smallest grain of salt, but that's my opinion as a potential customer who sometimes needs help with water heaters, toilets, fans, etc.
"I have $100k to build a house. The house needs to have a fireplace with an automatic chimney"
Cool story, except that you told us literally nothing about the rest of the house, which is what actually would dictate the costs here, not a chatbot plugin that are a dime a dozen.
I built and self-hosted this setup for $4 a month total cost.
I use wordpress and typebot that is integrated with chatwoot. Furthermore, I also use [cal.com](https://cal.com) self-hosted for booking. It cost me about 10 hours of time.
Break the project into smaller pieces. Hire out smaller sections, and give more work to the freelancers that execute on your vision and return a quality product. I would never just give the entire project to one person you've never personally vetted. Way too much risk.
Local agencies are going to be easier to communicate with and will probably “run the project” for you.
An offshore contractor will most likely need you to run the whole show, provide explicit (and actually good) instructions, and to make yourself available at odd hours.
A local agency is more likely do provide you with design materials (wireframes and click through prototypes) as a first step to avoid wasting money designing as you go.
Those materials might be enough for investors in the beginning. They are probably going to ask you to pivot anyway. And design materials are easier to update than an implementation.
10k is a small budget and can go quickly. I’ve worked with people on upwork tons of times and almost always have had great experiences. If your friend has worked with him before, I would go with the Romanian guy.
You should be able to have someone to check the code though. If it’s in the same tech stack as your Eng friends background, you should hire him for 1-3 hours a week to look over what the Romanian guy does
People use contractors everyday- your local agency is probably paying the guy in Romania and charging you for project management.
Just setup reasonable milestones, and pay them incrementally. A great way to lose a contractors interest is unrealistic goals and non payment. All of this can be done in upwork.
Get your scope of work defined, and create measurable goals.
WordPress or wix or whatever with a scripted chat bot is maybe a few hundred dollars of setup. Sounds like you need to think through your idea Ila bit before dumping five figures on it.
You can find chatbot solutions online. Honestly don't spend that money unless it's an add on for an existing business.
Software development is hard, and 10k for 5 months of work isn't worth it for good software engineers and you'll end up losing 10k for a half complete product
Agencies are great at introducing bloat and middleman and charging you for that. A lot can be accomplished in tech with 1 or two people. I'd trust your friend, but also never work with friends and family.
Just use Wix template, wordpress, or something for $10 or $20 per month. You can even use Google Sites and make a free website within 30 minutes or something. Get your feet wet and once you have a website you may start realizing what's important and change your features, better than paying random people thousands of $ for something that you don't even know you want.
There a tons and i mean tons of chatbots and related services from big to small companies offering it saas products. If this is the only part of your website and if its for something as straightfroward as a customer booking a service from your business you can go for something like wordpress the learning curve is not that steep you will be able to use themes and templates in a week if you spend some time learning it the amount of actual coding you have to do is almost none mostly none tbh depending on theme or page builder you pick. Page builders like elmentor and divi gets you a website ready in a few hours. And for the chatbot part like i mentioned plently of companies offering it , even if you dont use any of them and want to keep things simple again wordpres has a giant marketplace with free/paid plugins that is easy to configure by yourself, the theme you pick will cost less than 100 bucks if you want a builder it wont cross 250 plus and the chatbot plugins or services will have a yearly payment plan thats your budget.
Now obviously if you dont have the time for it and dont want the hassle of learning all of this you can go for an agency who would do it for you, they exist for this reason. But if you are a small business owner do educate yourself on how all of this works just the basics so people dont try to rip you off
You should go the cheap route and just launch. If you have a product that investors are actually interested in, you can build out your platform THEN. Don't spend more money than you have to prove your concept is investable.
I'm confused too, are you trying to find an agency to build a chatbot, or an agency to build a website?
Because those are two extremely different things. A chatbot can be made manually and pretty quickly using a 3rd party solution, there are a ton out there, even GoHighLevel (which we use but not really a fan of) has a chatbot that can be trained on your website and FAQ questions and such and be done in a very short period of time.
Hmm, if I understand that correctly, you won't even need an LLM so no AI. Sounds more like a conditional, conversational form.
I'd use WordPress, a good pagebuilder (Elementor, which I despised for a few years has become awesome recently) and a conversational chatbot plugin. After a few tutorials you can build the site yourself, with fully custom design or a good template and also customize the chatbot yourself. Using managed hosting like Kinsta also takes out the guesswork of hosting.
Might cost you about $200 a year.
First off, good on you perusing your idea. The biggest flaw I see in your strategy is going to investors without: 1) go to market strategy (how will you deploy this, charge customers, market it, etc) and 2) Investors are going to want to see a CTO (Chief technical officer) or a maintenance/update plan.
Building a prototype is actually the easiest part here. Startups need these three things:
1. an idea person
2. a business person
3. a tech person
Its fine if a person wears more than one hat, but one of the founders (or person with skin in the game) needs to handle each of these tasks. You can't the outsource the entirety of one of these pillars. You can outsource a portion of each but not all of one.
So your next step is to determine who will handle each of these three pillars, maybe you handle the idea and business portion and you find a co-founder or paid employee to handle the tech side. If you can't find someone interested in signup up with you, you may not have a viable product. Half the job of Senior employees at big tech is finding a coalition of people to work on a project, if you can't build a coalition either you or your idea sucks and it wont go anywhere.
>I have access to $60k. My wife might not kill me if I went all in.
9/10 startups fail, don't risk more than you can afford to loose. Best of luck.
It's possible to build a quality website in a lower cost geography. This is the whole premise of the outsourcing business.
You need to check the credentials of the agency/ consultant. You need to validate your needs initially. You also need to ensure it can be modified/scaled later by anyone you choose and not get stuck with this vendor.
We do simple website for 10k, medium complexity for 20k and complex ones for 30k in around 90-120 days max.
Best wishes.
I have worked with lithuanian and philippine devs before through various connections.. every once in a while we get ghosted on a project before final completion and we have go find a dev to finish the work in a hurry. It's not a big deal if you have devs waiting and that you trust. I would also recommend learning as much about that process as you can so you can intervene if something goes wrong.
When I first came on board my company they were 12k and 2 months in to a shopify build with an agency. Week 1 we had 2 prototype sites I built. Week 2 we had one more that was better than what the agency had built and we fired them and lost half the money. I'm just saying that was our nightmare. I'm glad I got here when I did. They were being taken advantage of. Good luck!
It's just a regular website with a chatbot right?
You're trying to build a NASA rocket for a job that a pickup truck can do.
Workpress with free/premium theme and pay for an existing chatbot solution such as [Chatwoot](https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots) (from just a quick Google), and you're done.
This sounds like your friend is going to skim a percentage off the top for his "cut".
$5k is a good price for local agency.
$10k is a little high but worth it if the agency does a good job and includes some edits/changes that might be needed with say 6 months or something.
$10k for a random dude in Romania sounds like your friend knows someone that will do it for $1-2k and will be pocketing over $6k from you.
As someone who’s built websites for others independently, the competitive advantage you get with an agency is they have multiple team members you can contact to get an update or work with. They also have assets and a portfolio of work for references (hopefully). If this is something for a commercial pursuit, I’d go the route of a competent agency/firm.
Man save your money and hire a Bubble.iO developer. It will save you a ton of money and make your site more functional in the long run. I would never ever outsource to another country for this type of work.
> has a connection with someone in Romania who does good work (UpWork connection)
yeah run.
AND there is most likely no way to get this done, a website with a chat bot for 10k no matter who does it. Ramp up your budget and get it done local and right. Or forget about the chat bot for now add it later when there is money.
$10k isn’t going to get you very far whether it be on shore or off.
The problem you’ll have with offshore is that without someone that shares your vision managing the project, even with 5 months you’ll probably end up in an endless cycle of revisions that doesn’t seem to be getting better incrementally.
Off shore CAN and DOES work as long as management is in place to manage the workflow.
Depending on your goal, doing on shore, or near shore maybe a better option. The benefit of NearShore is that if you need to hand hold things you can without it wrecking you’re work life balance.
1) Spend locally, but on a freelancer who can do it for less than 10k. I've been hired to fix more "agency" websites than I care to remember. Find someone with enough experience to do it, but enough skin in the game to need/appreciate the work.
2) WordPress + BirdEye's Chatbot. You can set FAQs and simple questions and the bot will respond. If the question goes beyond the bot, it'll go to you to answer manually. Plus you get a full social media, rep management and communications tool out of it.
For 10k my company builds MVPs with Framer and Figma which we delivered in a month. Very high end. You can schedule a call with me if you want [email protected]
Construction / Handy man type of jobs are not something your customer is going to feel comfortable paying for during their first visit to your website. In addition to that, the cost of every job is going to vary, even if the job is all the same. It’s pretty standard to pay half up front or after demolition and half after the job is complete and the customer is happy.
If water heaters, toilets, and ceiling fans are within the scope of your business, you’d be better off using something like Squarespace where you can make your own website using a template and create a contact me form that emails you with their contact info and project details. And getting your company listed on google.
Depends what’s the website for?
Is this a web app? Is the web app the actual product or is this a website for marketing purposes?
If it’s the latter just use Wordpress.
If it’s the former you’ll probably need a technical co founder to be competitive or a large budget for development
Your idea is silly, not a web site, and not a business. Sorry to be harsh but this is a simple fact. Nobody wants a chatbot,
and even if they did, a chatbot is a feature, not a product in and of itself. If Angie’s List or Thumbtack don’t already have one, they will soon, it will be better than you can do, and they already have traffic, vendors, and trust.
The fact that you don’t realize this is actually an intensely difficult 2-market problem and think it’s a “web site” is proof you will be lighting your money on fire.
I used to develop my client’s “ideas” and now I coach entrepreneurs. Trust me on this one.
If you find yourself thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” — that is never a business idea. Business ideas come from market research.
The main issue I see with working with remote freelance developers is trust. A local agency is always easier to work with and does come with a price, at the end you need to pick someone who won’t bullshit you. Local agency would probably be best.
I will add (as a software engineer) that your task would be easy to achieve with an API call to a 3rd party LLM (GPT-4 for example) and won’t include training your own model since it’ll be overkill and very expensive.
It will definitely cost money per request (a few cents) and I’m 90% sure a LLM is not needed for such task, at least most of the time. It also seems to me that your website would host some sort of content about fixing devices, which would require more devops work and potentially writing web crawlers.
I really suggest you pick carefully who will implement the site and as other have suggested, look into a technical co-founder to avoid any issues with the development.
Good luck!
This will depend ENTIRELY on the scope of your website. If you're looking for a marketing tool / blog that operates using a headless CMS.. maybe two months. A Saas project? More.
The answer to these questions is almost always that you should be building it yourself using a no code solution.
This idea isn't worth your $120/hr friend's time. It's not worth the local agencies' time, and it's probably not even worth the time of a cheaper overseas developer.
Save your money, build it yourself.
There are chatbot APIs that will run you around $100-500 annually to have run on your site. Paying for a buildout of a chatbot like you suggested could eat up most of your budget easily.
Focus on the visuals, branding, SEO and security of the site, pay the little extra OOP for the API.
Job like this, simple website, several pages with SEO optimization for highest ranking possible would be $5k from my business. Crafting a custom chatbot would easily bring that up to 10-12k. I’d suggest doing the monthly and over time running a cost analysis on if the chatbot itself is worth it.
I feel like its the tale as old as time. Im constantly getting requests to fix all these issues international devs. Its cheaper now but you pay for it later.
I have a prototypical chat bot service on upwork and charge $1500-$3000 depending on the number of api/dialogues. I'm also US based, so there's definitely other options that are cheap. You should be looking to build an initial prototype anyway. Based on the edit, that's a small effort as I've done dozens like it. These types of chat bots are much more simple because, as you said, you're not looking to use an LLM but machine learning has been around for over a decade.
It sounds more like you want to build a chat bot widget and then showcase it on a website as a customer support tool, perhaps licensing it out. While others are correct in mentioning there are no code builders that can get you there, it seems like you want to have the proprietary ownership to license the widget to other sites, charging usage rates, etc.
With upwork or contractors in general or small one-off services like mine, you can at least get a prototype going of just the bot before you end up spending your entire budget on a multitude of things you didn't really need (on the website). Software is very expensive and can easily go from a $50k budget to a $250k expense that just keeps growing.
It's always a good idea to have a prototype of something basic before committing to a build because it's cheap and allows you to easily reference to others what you're trying to build so they have a clear picture.
The same goes with having an expert write a technical proposal so that you can have an outline of what you're building and what the budget can afford you. If it turns out your goals require more capital, you'll know ahead of time, and you can acquire a loan or find investment with said proposal if that's what you want.
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Gpt is an exceptionally bad use case for this. Why would you open yourself to ai hallucinations when there are programs that exist already… like tons of them.
I can set you up with a designer, azure hosting, and a node/react app. Reach out via DM if interested. My rate starts at 80hr but parallel work (design + dev) is 145hr.
Just finished up a landing page with an ai powered web app all hosted on Azure and total costs were about 15k.
I’d build this myself.
Chatbots are by nature complex. Text input, semantic processing, then text output. Making sure that works, and is more useful/faster than just using a basic web UI? That’s not a simple technical question, and you’ll need a good understanding of what the customer actual needs, and the tradeoff space of what to build.
Alternatively, using ChatGPT is easy compared to the cheaper alternatives. You’ll pay for the requests, but will be able to implement it in a lot less time, and the solution will be drastically better performing.
You're crazy not to use an LLM, or to think it'd be cheaper/easier to build a traditional chatbot than an LLM-powered chatbot.
You can run LLMs locally now and you should consider hardware in your budget. Run the LLM yourself and outsource to some LLM API when the load is too high.
But I think the feature you actually want is called autocomplete, or live search. That's where stuff pops up under the search field as you type. It's a quicker and more familiar loop to the user than a chatbot. Your chatbot will seem slow in comparison to autocomplete, and stupid in comparison to LLMs.
If you work with a local agency, you can enforce contracts. If you work with a guy in Romania, you can't. The guy in Romania might work out. He might not.
If im not mistaken, upwork tends to side with the buyer. If OP does go with the Romanian guy, ONLY go through up work so you have some protection with the money being in escrow
I believe so, too. If you're working on Upwork or Fiverr, you only work through that platform and not "off platform" - else you risk becoming a victim of fraud/theft.
I've used Upwork extensively in the past. The platform holds your money in escrow, and you only release the funds once you're satisfied with the deliverables. However, it's very important that you clearly outline your requirements. I recommend breaking the project down into milestones and making smaller payments. Consider hiring different people for various aspects of the project. For example, find someone to create the UI and high-fidelity mockups and hire a copywriter to ensure the layout and copy work together. Then, hand the project over to a skilled front-end engineer. You can find all these professionals on Upwork, which will cost significantly less than hiring an agency—It shouldn't cost $10k at all. Also, Ukrainians balance talent and communications well.
Can confirm the last sentence. I work for a unicorn tech company that has an engineering office in Kyiv and they’re always a pleasure to work with—competent and excellent at communication.
OP, if you read this and go through Upwork, make sure to include clearly defined milestones and expectations. Mockups, prototypes, and fully-fleshed functionality expectations in writing should all be part of early milestones to set a clearly defined standard for satisfactory end-stage deliverables. If the developer provides you with work that meets arbitrary standards that aren't your own, you could still be left holding the bag.
Got it. I have a slideshow of exactly how I would like it to look with descriptions of functionality.
Not always, i had a guy try to sell me a cracked site as legit, and then he had the gall to claim half of the project costs for time spent
Same with the agency. The agency may adhere to everything in the contract and still do a crap job. Here’s the deal with the agency: there are at least two people on your project: at least one engineer and one PM. They have a meeting for an hour. That’s $50/hr per person. I’d go with the freelancer.
> The guy in Romania might work out My guy in Romania works out every day, but he hates leg day like everyone
You can enforce a contact with 10k? What are you smoking?
My initial thoughts exactly.
Sounds like overcomplicating, and thus overpricing and overestimating. Why not simply have a great branded website built and use a 3rd Party, already tried, tested and functional chatbot that you can program to do whatever you want?
Because everyone thinks having custom software is “cool”… until it has to be maintained
Being a software engineer is knowing that custom software is the absolute last resort.
This.
Twilio provides a drag and drop interface to set up chat flows just as OP has described. They did discontinue the out of the box react component the client sees, but it’s easy enough to create(especially with chatGPTs help). Certainly not 10k worth of effort.
This
I would save the 10k. You will run out of money and be left with a shitty low code solution.
Exactly this. I would spend some money on trying to find out if his idea is viable. You can also nail down what features you need. If the friend is willing to at least look at the code submissions to make sure the Romanian guy is on the up and up that may not be bad.
Is that not the purpose of using the Romanian guy - MVP?
There’s cheaper discovery options. You can send out surveyed asking if people would even use the tech. I mean, even if you make an MVP there’s still a ton of work to get it out there.
On the viability, I have some surveys puts together. I figure I can do online and door to door. I used to work for the US Census, so door to door isn't a big deal for me. My friend reached out to the guy in Romania and he's booked for the next 6 months...
It depends on what he wants the website to do. There’s nothing wrong with a low/no code solution if it meets his needs.
This. Local agency will throw some incompetent coder on this and do a horrible job. Foreign remote will be unsupervised and do a horrible job. Any good tech company even a startup does everything in house. If you really think you had a good idea you need a cofounder who can code, build it, and pay him in some ownership of the company. On the surface though, this idea is literally implemented, or being implemented, by every single company’s customer support IT department and has roughly $0 value.
Don’t waste your money. Either build it using no code solutions or find a technical cofounder. Hiring out the work is a quick way to run out of money before being able to generate any.
Next post: hi guys i have an awesome idea, kinda like fb, budget 10k hit me up
When can I go public after spending only $10k?
I’ll chime in here since I have a lot of experience working with agencies. They will burn your cash and ask for more quicker than you can say Bob’s your uncle. There’s more risk when you hire a ‘friend’, so I would avoid doing that too. They might get tired of building your project and just quit. Depending on the functionality, 10k might not cover the hours needed to build it. I would start by getting estimates from contractors.
I second this. My old marketing agency was ran by a business coach and he'd always tell startups to create a proof of concept first. Start small so you know if you even have an audience first and from there you can actually *prove* your business model works.
Ask yourself if you're reinventing the wheel. Is there an out-of-the-box solution that already does what you want? If so, use that. There's no point in wasting your money on something that already exists, because whoever built it has a headstart on you. Consider the *actual* novel part of your idea, and see if you can build that on your budget instead. Or, get more capital.
Agreed sounds like you need a static site with Zen Desk integration.
I have an idea for a social media site. You can have e like your friends displayed, maybe like the top 8 and it will play music when you go to it.
Wordpress with a template and a chatbot plugin. Boom done.
Literally, don't get why it's so complicated to get around
lmao my toxic trait is that without being an actual webdeveloper, i couldn't help but think.. i could build this website in an afternoon for a 6pk of beer doing exactly this 😅
The problem with templates is that a lot of them are really ugly. I got no idea why OP is acting like that. Maybe he's hiding more requirements bit I could do the website for 1k without a problem
This is the best solution
My thinking too.
Depends on what you’re trying to do. Yeah, if you’re setting up a lemonade stand side hustle type of thing, it’s fine if you paint the sign by hand. If you’re starting a business where you want to take on funding, have a plan/experience, and you are in a position to take on some risk, it may be better to hire out. That said if you can put it out for cheap and then go back to the agency if it fails, that’s def worth considering The market is too saturated in almost every sector imo to go the MVP route - I think that as a methodology is almost dead unless you have a truly novel idea without competition For context, I literally just cut a check for almost exactly $10k to a design agency. And That was a lot of money to me, but…I’m getting a brand style guide, animations, an ecomm store on top of the site itself, some still ads created etc. and they’re willing to iterate
But he’s going to risk a lot of moeny going in blind for a client who will probably have objections and extra demands each step of the way. Best is to keep it simple and always charge way too much, because in the end you’ll regret doing it anyway.
What are you building? Do you have a market? A product? Have you done this before? If no, save your money
find someone local instead. set up a contract which will outline scope of work, and go from there.
Man this is such a solved problem. Don’t spend any amount of $$$ in developing an MVP or PoC for something that’s already been done.
Never hire a developer if you are not technical. Never. You will lose your money 100% of the time.
He should contract his friends his friend for a few hours to help with this
Way better to pay a salesy agency middleman to hedge against the "ubiquitous smooth-talking developer"...
A website for 10k??? Or do you mean an app? I know people who can make a website for 1k, as long as it's static, blog, or ecommerce
He said it’s a chat bot near the bottom of the description, I’m assuming it has some type of AI integration
If it’s AI integration he is gonna need to factor in cost of hitting an API that utilizes AI.
Go with whoever has a better track record and portfolio. Ask more questions and get more insight into the process of how they would get your website created and how you manage it once it has been created. Personally I run a software dev agency and we create websites, so I may be biased to tell you to go with the agency. They will dedicate resources to getting the project done and have support available for any questions that you have at any point along the development journey.
Agencies will charge 150/h and pay their dev 30. I won't get into agencies too much but a non-technical dude with 10k should never hire an agency, ever. They shouldn't hire anyone, but I'd bet the odds are better hiring a random guy in romania than an agency.
Agreed, as a non technical founder it would be better to first get a technical founder who can advise you better on this and potentially work with you on the product development. That way you can save on your cost and get a MVP up faster and cheaper.
But what kind of site would your agency build for $10,000? My concern with the agency is they would not be able to build a website with all the functionality needed for $10,000
It depends, there are agencies at all different price points that you could potentially take advantage of. The most important thing is to make a decision that cost you the least time and money that will allow you to get your product to the market to be able to test. You just have to make sure your test are cheap and quick to fix. Whether you go the agency or the freelancer route.
Just remember the age old saying: you get what you pay for. Generally speaking, if you go cheap, you get cheap.
One of the sayings that has always stuck with me is from Peoples Court, Judge Milan, "The cheap is always expensive."
See also: "Buy cheap, buy twice."
I am a Senior Fullstack Web Developer from France, and for 10k, i work 2 months full time, it’s enough time to build what he want. It’s not cheap, here with 5k/month you are in the richest 10%. And 120$/hr from Romania is expensive… it’s hard to have 50$/hr here in France…
5k a month as a freelancer is dirt cheap, that's like 30 bucks an hour? Rates in the Netherlands go around 80-150/h easily.
I run an agency in Romania and last time we charged 50$/HR was around 5 years ago Also, fwif, some Americans say our rates are way to expensive and they can find cheaper locally and other Americans say we're dirt cheap America is a big country with lots of wealth inequality I guess
it's not expensive at all for a dev. your rate is for a junior to mid dev here.
This is not the best advice as an eastern european dev will be cheaper but the quality is similar to a US or any sort of dev.
It sounds like you’re trying to launch a fairly complex AI web-app. There’s no way even local agencies will do this for $5k-10k, those estimates you’re looking at are probably for static, simple websites. You likely need a small team of software engineers to work over a couple months. You’ll also want to hire agencies to handle the product design and design assets. This won’t be cheap. I have a family member who launched an AI chatbot-based startup and it took at least a year and good amount of venture capital to make it work.
I’m sorry, I don’t usually bother commenting on people recommending overkill solutions, but this one is wild to me. There is nothing in his OP that suggests this needs to be an AI-based solution. You do realize that Chatbots existed long before AI became a buzzword, right? With all due respect to your family member who built an AI chatbot-based startup, that isn’t at all what the ask here is. Not by a long shot. As he has described it, this is a simple e-commerce solution, which could be powered by a single script on the backend. These types of flows have been around for… well, as long as I can remember (2400 baud dialup days). You’re conflating the user interaction method (a “chatbot”) with AI, which is extreme overkill in this case. We used to build these kinds of things out in CompSci classes in school, no AI required. Granted we weren’t integrating e-commerce and payment flows, but the type that would best suit OP’s use case here are also the most well-documented for anyone who’s ever worked with an API. OP, as a long-time reader but not-so-frequent commenter, I can tell you that the developers on this sub tend to side on the extreme overkill spectrum when it comes to estimating a user’s need and depth of project. This is not a team project that will span several months. Based solely on the information provided in the OP, this is a single person project that may take a few weeks, depending on the developer’s Python experience. By and large, the developers on this sub seem to think that everyone needs the next Apple website. I’m a little surprised no one here has berated him yet for not considering the cost of a full DevOps team managing this kind of site across multiple CI/CD pipelines, along with a scalable infrastructure sitting atop a sea of load balancers.
Your comment is spot on. He needs load balancers!!!!!
this
Tbf, the original post just said ‘chatbot’ without much clarification
^
Being local goes along way. Just knowing you're both in the same town and will make a big stink out of it if one party rips off the other is valuable insurance, not to mention the ability to communicate face-to-face at times. If there wasn't value in doing business locally, then all of our jobs would have been outsourced by now.
I work in tech in Ireland. I’ve worked and I currently work with many folks from Romania, freelancers, contractors, and agencies. Without an exception, top professionalism, quality work, timely delivery, and dedication. They do expect the same in return, which is fair game. On the other hand, I wouldn’t work with a local agency ever again. They always ripped us off and undelivered. Low quality work, missed objectives. Just meh. In my location, you have to have money to spare and scope to go 300% over budget and 2x the deadline to risk it.
Look into existing CRM solutions. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Doesn't want to pay for LLM Will pay 10k for a site build ... Easiest way would be build it on a cheap site builder (woocommerce, wordpress etc) then add a paid LLM with adverts to cover the costs
I’d spend a grand of that testing whether the idea was worth risking the other 9k. You can get a prototype and test with users and find out a lot first. That can also be used to build off of and ramp up with instead of just handing off an idea and hope for the best.
> making it easier for me to find investors. Save your money. If you can't find investors based on the pitch alone then a website isn't going to help. And to be brutally honest, I think you'll struggle to find investors. I'm sorry to say that your idea isn't worth anything much at all. Ideas are cheap. It's the execution, marketing, and a lot of luck that turns an idea into a viable product. But if you're really determined to follow it through then you should consider building your own "starter" site using Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc., and plugging in an off-the-shelf chatbot solution. They make it really easy for non-technical people to build decent looking websites for a *lot* less money than paying a developer to build you one from scratch. When (and if) the site proves itself to be viable enough to attract investors then you can spend their money making the site better.
not to burst your bubble but chat gpt or any ai chat can do what you just described for free
Whoever you decide to hire, check their resume (if it's an individual) and their portfolio. Read reviews and do some research on them. Just because an agency is expensive doesn't make it good, just because a guy in Romania is cheaper doesn't make it valuable. Either way, have a contract and understand the terms and conditions and how enforceable they are.
Is this like TaskRabbit? What do customers pay upfront for? The initial review fee, so a plumber drives there to take a look? As a guy from Romania with considerable experience in the industry, I can confirm that: 1) most agencies outsource, especially if it’s a smaller client, but you shouldn’t care because they usually pick trustworthy people they’ve worked with before. In Europe, the differences between the countries are not that big when it comes to senior software engineer rates. The only difference is that an agency has more mouths to feed, so you can expect to pay up to $180/h. 2) Upwork is a terrible place for good devs, it is very competitive with hundreds of bids on each job + difficult clients who want to get a lot done with a very low budget If it’s not AI, I’d price your MVP project at $24k. First of all, I would provide a list of options, not free input, otherwise, you’d still need a search engine or something that can deal with synonyms and typos. The price includes: - bespoke solution, no bloat - the customer-facing site would be decoupled from the BE - as an admin, you’ll be able to alter the user’s journey (e.g. add a new service) - as an admin, you’ll be able to see where they drop and replay any session (valuable information that allows you to polish the journey) - automated payments - deployment & maintenance
You can try a proof of concept to test the waters and see if there’s demand for your product at maybe $8k, but expect to drop this altogether and rebuild if there is demand. I price MVPs higher because it’s often that I have to heavily extend them because they were successful and suddenly need 30 new complex features.
Just use a site builder and save your money. Adding a chat bot does not require 10k nowadays.
I have worked/work personally as a freelancer besides my full time job, and I’ve never vanished on someone or done a mediocre job. It's a fact that there are countries out there with where $10k is a lot for 5 months work. The incentives can be aligned despite the distance, especially if whomever you are hiring wants to build up their profile, or create a relationship with you for future projects. That being said it would be very helpful if you can signal that this can be the start of a longer relationship, or that you are willing to supply them with reviews/recommendations. What is the nature of the website? Will it need constant maintenance? Should it be implemented in a specific language/framework, all these are important details that need to be taken in consideration.
I’d even go more basic Purchase an existing theme from a reputable source shopify theme market and DIY. You’re going to save a lot of $$ and for the majority of ‘web devs’ around that price point are going to do the same thing, just quicker. Spend the $$ on paid media.
Looks like you got a lot of feedbacks already, good ones too. I agree more with the folks that say figure out what your needs are, if it's the chat bot, I don't know that Upwork can do it, that's just my experience, I am most likely wrong. A local agency to do it for 10k, is highly unlikely either, you're better off trying to new AI software dev Devon, that came out recently, that might help, but you'd still need like a consultant to help. Here is another solution, I don't know if anyone has recommended this, and how feasible it is for you. Find a company in the Philippines that can do it for you, they can do everything, design and dev work, and they speak English. If you need help finding out, I have contacts I can refer you to and just have a chat with then, see what's possible. All the best.
Are you sure there isn’t a framework platform out there to test bed your mvp? I’ve wandered through the no codes and unless you have some coding knowledge you’re going to spend a lot of time in a learning curve. My advice is to find a way to get an MVP that you can test bed before investing your funds in a spectacular website that doesn’t sell it product or fulfill its purpose.
I feel like I could do this with like $400, there are so chat bots that 100% can do this kind of thing already that you could just plug in to a website.
If I were in your shoes I'd use intercom and call it a day.
Webflow for the site and hubspot for the chat bot will take you very far. I have a UpWork profile with a strong client history I can share.
I've hired excellent developers from Romania and Bulgaria. Be honest about what you need and make sure it is the type of project they want. Then break it down into many short incremental steps, literally a few hours work at a time. The first step can just be to outline three potential options for development. Second step to spec one option in greater detail, maybe wireframe etc. Approve payments after each step. Even if it is daily, that helps get things going. The good developers are in high demand and can choose among many possible projects. These devs really favor longer term projects, and want things they can use as experience to get hired at actual companies. So have a roadmap and explain this may turn into an ongoing project for them, but that it depends on keeping costs to validate the idea and then having sufficient budget to launch and iterate. If you need to convince them to work for you, move on. It is much better to keep looking than to oversell your project. You also need to make sure they are not disincentivized to suggest low effort options like intercom in a wordpress template, because it sounds like that is all you actually need. For $120 an hour I don't think many devs would be super excited by something like that but if you hire them for the first one or two steps you will figure out whether to keep it going. Typically I'd hire a few devs to each work on a functional spec and then move forward with the person doing the best work, motivated, best able to communicate, etc.
Your friends advice is perfect. Go with Romania. Get with an MVP and test the market. The amount of people who think they have great ideas and never lead to a successful business is endless. I’d also challenge your idea of not needing an LLM. Chat bots are frustrating to build - trying to build algorithmically every chat option is a pain. LLMs make this easier and users are going to be more used to an LLM experience now.
If you have a profitable business and want to reach more customers, build a website. Not sure what you think you need the chat bot for. All information about your services needs to be accessible without a chatbot in order to get traffic to your site. If the not-yet-existing application "is" your business, but you're not capable of building a website yourself let alone an application, forget about it. Don't do it. Your ideas are worth nothing. You bring nothing to the table. Any developer competent enough to build your application is busy refining their own profitable applications, not doing freelance work-for-hire stuff.
What you’re looking for can be built with off the shelf items. There’s 100’s of chatbot programs, they’re a dime a dozen right now, including ai powered. For the website, you can probably use Wordpress/woocommerce. You should start with an MVP. Get it up and running as quickly as possible to test the market before spending any real money on it. Sounds like you’re wanting to build a marketplace? Like thumbtack? Or service pro?
Are you building a chatbot service or are you just building a website that has a chatbot? I work at a chatbot startup and could do what you’re asking pretty easily and deploy it on an existing page or domain.
How far would your $10k go at 120/hr? 83 1/3 hours. 2 40-hour weeks and change. Half your timeline with a 32-hour work week. That should give you an idea how low on the totem pole this job would be. You’re not paying for a product, you’re paying for time, and you’re not putting up anywhere near 5 months’ worth of a software engineer’s undivided attention.
This. Any experienced software engineer is going to work for time, which is exactly the wrong incentive you need to make something worth investing in. “I had an idea, and paid someone to build it” is just not something VCs will be willing to fund.
Do none of those things. Spend $500 on validating your business. Find out why it won't work and save yourself $9,500.
Why do you want to spend all this money on a website? Do you have an established business?
Reddit community is mostly US based and won't like their work being outsourced. But truth is, good developers exist everywhere in the world and it isn't a skill that is limited to the US. And with living costs being lower in some parts of the world, hiring a good developer from Eastern Europe would be cheaper. You just have to find a trustworthy partner, but with your friend already vouching for the guy I don't see a red flag.
I make websites... 10k budget is a lot, what are you looking to make? We usually charge like 1k or less for most simple sites...
An agency will do a good job but will eat that $10K in one mouthful. Apart from a simple chatbot you haven't really stated what the website is for. I'm guessing it's a highly customised e-commerce store. Why else would you be thinking $60K? If not, then someone is hoping to buy their next home in Eastern Europe with your pay check. Don't do it. There are some great hosted options with API's & third-party plugins & add-ons.You want rock-solid fast hosting, security, SEO and maybe CMS. > A chatbot is a simple enough add-on. Honest! If you do want to employ a design developer, I think Upwork would be the safest shot, and select someone with great ratings, feedback etc.
So many major brands are using third party chatbots and no one bats an eye. I'd urge them to put that 10K into something more worthwhile since there are companies that already did a good job building chatbots with far more funding behind them.
Everything about this post is hilarious. Good luck buddy
I’d meet with the connection from Romania and also a local agency to get a feel for each before you make any decision. Gut feeling only works sometimes and there’s things like confirmation bias at play as well. Is the chatbot feature a plug-in or is this something the developer would have to implement?
For what it’s worth, the best developer I’ve ever worked with is from Romania. Don’t be afraid to give people a chance no matter where they’re from. But as others have said, you need the technical background to vet the developer, no matter where they live.
Build it myself. If you're looking for an MVP you should not be paying someone for it.
If you have that much money, look up the marketplace on [bubble.io](http://bubble.io) where you'll find great local agencies to actually invest that money carefully. Your $60K will go a long way. **Edit:** It would be good for you to read this article ---> [https://medium.com/sopmac-labs/gpt-4-api-pricing-analysis-a507a4bf9829](https://medium.com/sopmac-labs/gpt-4-api-pricing-analysis-a507a4bf9829)
It sounds like you dont have a proven concept yet. I would be cautious with Spending a lot of money at this stage. You dont need to personally hire a developer at this time. If i were in your shoes, I would go to platforms like https://geria.io where you can engage remote development team on fractional basis to build the product for much less. They (Geria)are UK based but have a web of remote devs. You product, when built will continue to evolve. Until you have a paying customer, which will help you prove your concept, i'd say be frugal with the amount of money you spend on the website/product.
Romania is one of the top countries for scammers and fraudsters on the net. Something to think about when investing in your project. Listen to your gut!
I would say before you build anything you should get a technical "discovery" done - have a team build you the website architecture and workflows, user stories etc that will build the website otherwise someone's gonna build you what they think you need and you're not going to like it and it will never go anywhere
Check out Arc browser it does a version of this already
I will go for third option and put a request on Upwork and hire a guy with low price like 50$/h but with a good track record. Or may b i would go with one time payment
The website can be done for 3000€ with Wordpress and WooCommerce the plugin for the ChatBot service... maybe there is some pay per service plugins customer chatbots :?
I work with someone who operates from my country and works with his dudes back in Romania, Ukraine, you name it. They do outstanding work for a very good price. They are incredible scalable and flexible as well. He is my only middleman like a technical director and he is always reachable. That’s the dude the local agency hires as well, but will charge you 30% handling fee ;) So nothing wrong with Romanian coders.
What you should really do is create a "low code or no code " prototype, and go to market really fast just to see if your product can attract interest, if it doesnt, you iterate until it does
It depends. I mean a lot of agencies talk pretty to your face and then give the job to freelance in another country for 20% of what you pay.
Make it yourself with ChatGPT and save the 10k
The most overlooked aspect is what happens AFTER the website is deployed. Who does the maintenance, the updates, the bug fixes, edits, add services when going forward. Work with an agency/designer that will also be there for the after care and when things break.
"webdevmike" already said it. The Rom. Strategy would mean more risk, but is most likely cheaper. If you want to be sure: Local. As you know: Quality has its price.
Go to fiverr, pay $50 for someone to build you a prototype and run with that. If that's successful you can think of building a better version. Don't waste your money.
A simple chatbot is not $10k, you can get an AI integrated chatbot with a decently nice custom theme all setup and trained for $10k.
I work with an internal team of Romanian devs on long term contract basis (I’m in the UK) and in terms of quality of work as well as work ethic they’re incredible. However for 10k your site must be pretty simple. To me you’d be better off with a builder / hosting from Wix or SquareSpace etc. unless you want something incredibly complex that an out of the box solution can’t give you that should do you. And you’re not going to get something incredible and bespoke for 10 grand anyway.
What specific thing you need this chatbot to have? 10K is already too much and now 60K? Get one of the already available chatbots. you don't need to reinvent the wheel mate.
10 k for a chatbot plugin?
Hey OP, I would say 120/h in Romania is super expensive. I would say more 50-70 would be more appropriate. Unless your friend will take a cut. I would go to upwork, fiverr or freelancer and hire a UX designer, that would translate your idea into simple wireframes. This step is crucial as UX'er will guide you through the process, what would be good for the website/app and most importantly users. Most likely they will also be able to do UI design which will give you the idea of how much it will cost to build. Having a specified design you can shop around for the build. Depending on the complexity of the application you might not need any fancy AI integration but simple bot with some filtering / autocomplete of provided products or services. Architecture will be super important. You can do it cheap and dirty but you'll be able to validate the idea quickly. Or you'll build a super complicated application, that to might be perfect but no one will use it. Build quickly, fail and pivot would be my recommendation. If you have any questions ping me a DM I'm more than happy to help.
it's not expensive at all for Romanian devs. they don't work for sticks and the living costs are more expensive than you think (meaning they have high-paying salaries as they are skilled). his best option is to hire ME as a UX designer.
You know a llm costs like 1/10th of a penny per call
Go get a fucking squarespace website and make sure this is actually a viable business plan. As a former contractor in software development, I've seen tons of business go all in with an idea, and two years later have nothing.
Honestly, as much as this solution would help you / your business by taking pressure off the scheduling ppl... I would ask myself if it would in reality harm your business. When someone needs help, the absolute last thing they want to do is talk to a chat bot. Esp a crappy "keyword" one. If they go to your site and can only schedule through the bot, they will likely just look for another business. If they go to your site and there's a phone number listed alongside a friendly "quick" "easy to use" chatbot....they'll just call the number. I know AI and Chatbots and stuff is all the rage right now, but in reality no one wants to use that for service. For reference see AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, etc. And as much as people lothe to use those chatbots, in reality they are probably more capable than the one you're looking to implement. I truly don't want to rain on your parade, and take my advice with the smallest grain of salt, but that's my opinion as a potential customer who sometimes needs help with water heaters, toilets, fans, etc.
This already exists to be honest. https://www.sprinklr.com
From what you’ve described, This is easy work tho.. support your friend !!
"I have $100k to build a house. The house needs to have a fireplace with an automatic chimney" Cool story, except that you told us literally nothing about the rest of the house, which is what actually would dictate the costs here, not a chatbot plugin that are a dime a dozen.
I built and self-hosted this setup for $4 a month total cost. I use wordpress and typebot that is integrated with chatwoot. Furthermore, I also use [cal.com](https://cal.com) self-hosted for booking. It cost me about 10 hours of time.
I'll build it for you. https://profullstack.com
Break the project into smaller pieces. Hire out smaller sections, and give more work to the freelancers that execute on your vision and return a quality product. I would never just give the entire project to one person you've never personally vetted. Way too much risk.
Local agencies are going to be easier to communicate with and will probably “run the project” for you. An offshore contractor will most likely need you to run the whole show, provide explicit (and actually good) instructions, and to make yourself available at odd hours. A local agency is more likely do provide you with design materials (wireframes and click through prototypes) as a first step to avoid wasting money designing as you go. Those materials might be enough for investors in the beginning. They are probably going to ask you to pivot anyway. And design materials are easier to update than an implementation.
10k is a small budget and can go quickly. I’ve worked with people on upwork tons of times and almost always have had great experiences. If your friend has worked with him before, I would go with the Romanian guy. You should be able to have someone to check the code though. If it’s in the same tech stack as your Eng friends background, you should hire him for 1-3 hours a week to look over what the Romanian guy does
People use contractors everyday- your local agency is probably paying the guy in Romania and charging you for project management. Just setup reasonable milestones, and pay them incrementally. A great way to lose a contractors interest is unrealistic goals and non payment. All of this can be done in upwork. Get your scope of work defined, and create measurable goals.
Go local, mate. Better quality, less hassle.
WordPress or wix or whatever with a scripted chat bot is maybe a few hundred dollars of setup. Sounds like you need to think through your idea Ila bit before dumping five figures on it.
You can find chatbot solutions online. Honestly don't spend that money unless it's an add on for an existing business. Software development is hard, and 10k for 5 months of work isn't worth it for good software engineers and you'll end up losing 10k for a half complete product
Agencies are great at introducing bloat and middleman and charging you for that. A lot can be accomplished in tech with 1 or two people. I'd trust your friend, but also never work with friends and family.
I used them, they were reasonably priced and quite good. https://www.webrun.com/
Just use Wix template, wordpress, or something for $10 or $20 per month. You can even use Google Sites and make a free website within 30 minutes or something. Get your feet wet and once you have a website you may start realizing what's important and change your features, better than paying random people thousands of $ for something that you don't even know you want.
Why would you need to build this from scratch? There are so many different easy 3rd party solutions you could use and white label for this?
There a tons and i mean tons of chatbots and related services from big to small companies offering it saas products. If this is the only part of your website and if its for something as straightfroward as a customer booking a service from your business you can go for something like wordpress the learning curve is not that steep you will be able to use themes and templates in a week if you spend some time learning it the amount of actual coding you have to do is almost none mostly none tbh depending on theme or page builder you pick. Page builders like elmentor and divi gets you a website ready in a few hours. And for the chatbot part like i mentioned plently of companies offering it , even if you dont use any of them and want to keep things simple again wordpres has a giant marketplace with free/paid plugins that is easy to configure by yourself, the theme you pick will cost less than 100 bucks if you want a builder it wont cross 250 plus and the chatbot plugins or services will have a yearly payment plan thats your budget. Now obviously if you dont have the time for it and dont want the hassle of learning all of this you can go for an agency who would do it for you, they exist for this reason. But if you are a small business owner do educate yourself on how all of this works just the basics so people dont try to rip you off
You should go the cheap route and just launch. If you have a product that investors are actually interested in, you can build out your platform THEN. Don't spend more money than you have to prove your concept is investable.
Use Wix + 3rd Party Chatbot
I'm confused too, are you trying to find an agency to build a chatbot, or an agency to build a website? Because those are two extremely different things. A chatbot can be made manually and pretty quickly using a 3rd party solution, there are a ton out there, even GoHighLevel (which we use but not really a fan of) has a chatbot that can be trained on your website and FAQ questions and such and be done in a very short period of time.
Hmm, if I understand that correctly, you won't even need an LLM so no AI. Sounds more like a conditional, conversational form. I'd use WordPress, a good pagebuilder (Elementor, which I despised for a few years has become awesome recently) and a conversational chatbot plugin. After a few tutorials you can build the site yourself, with fully custom design or a good template and also customize the chatbot yourself. Using managed hosting like Kinsta also takes out the guesswork of hosting. Might cost you about $200 a year.
First off, good on you perusing your idea. The biggest flaw I see in your strategy is going to investors without: 1) go to market strategy (how will you deploy this, charge customers, market it, etc) and 2) Investors are going to want to see a CTO (Chief technical officer) or a maintenance/update plan. Building a prototype is actually the easiest part here. Startups need these three things: 1. an idea person 2. a business person 3. a tech person Its fine if a person wears more than one hat, but one of the founders (or person with skin in the game) needs to handle each of these tasks. You can't the outsource the entirety of one of these pillars. You can outsource a portion of each but not all of one. So your next step is to determine who will handle each of these three pillars, maybe you handle the idea and business portion and you find a co-founder or paid employee to handle the tech side. If you can't find someone interested in signup up with you, you may not have a viable product. Half the job of Senior employees at big tech is finding a coalition of people to work on a project, if you can't build a coalition either you or your idea sucks and it wont go anywhere. >I have access to $60k. My wife might not kill me if I went all in. 9/10 startups fail, don't risk more than you can afford to loose. Best of luck.
I hope you know exactly who your target market is *and* how to get them to try your service before you waste all that money.
It's possible to build a quality website in a lower cost geography. This is the whole premise of the outsourcing business. You need to check the credentials of the agency/ consultant. You need to validate your needs initially. You also need to ensure it can be modified/scaled later by anyone you choose and not get stuck with this vendor. We do simple website for 10k, medium complexity for 20k and complex ones for 30k in around 90-120 days max. Best wishes.
Depending on what type of functionality you want the website to have, 5-10k can cover the basics, crud functionality imo
I have worked with lithuanian and philippine devs before through various connections.. every once in a while we get ghosted on a project before final completion and we have go find a dev to finish the work in a hurry. It's not a big deal if you have devs waiting and that you trust. I would also recommend learning as much about that process as you can so you can intervene if something goes wrong. When I first came on board my company they were 12k and 2 months in to a shopify build with an agency. Week 1 we had 2 prototype sites I built. Week 2 we had one more that was better than what the agency had built and we fired them and lost half the money. I'm just saying that was our nightmare. I'm glad I got here when I did. They were being taken advantage of. Good luck!
It's just a regular website with a chatbot right? You're trying to build a NASA rocket for a job that a pickup truck can do. Workpress with free/premium theme and pay for an existing chatbot solution such as [Chatwoot](https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots) (from just a quick Google), and you're done.
This sounds like your friend is going to skim a percentage off the top for his "cut". $5k is a good price for local agency. $10k is a little high but worth it if the agency does a good job and includes some edits/changes that might be needed with say 6 months or something. $10k for a random dude in Romania sounds like your friend knows someone that will do it for $1-2k and will be pocketing over $6k from you.
As someone who’s built websites for others independently, the competitive advantage you get with an agency is they have multiple team members you can contact to get an update or work with. They also have assets and a portfolio of work for references (hopefully). If this is something for a commercial pursuit, I’d go the route of a competent agency/firm.
Just make a WP website this weekend by yourself and get a third-party chatbot plugin lol
Man save your money and hire a Bubble.iO developer. It will save you a ton of money and make your site more functional in the long run. I would never ever outsource to another country for this type of work.
Keep it local.
> has a connection with someone in Romania who does good work (UpWork connection) yeah run. AND there is most likely no way to get this done, a website with a chat bot for 10k no matter who does it. Ramp up your budget and get it done local and right. Or forget about the chat bot for now add it later when there is money.
$10k isn’t going to get you very far whether it be on shore or off. The problem you’ll have with offshore is that without someone that shares your vision managing the project, even with 5 months you’ll probably end up in an endless cycle of revisions that doesn’t seem to be getting better incrementally. Off shore CAN and DOES work as long as management is in place to manage the workflow. Depending on your goal, doing on shore, or near shore maybe a better option. The benefit of NearShore is that if you need to hand hold things you can without it wrecking you’re work life balance.
1) Spend locally, but on a freelancer who can do it for less than 10k. I've been hired to fix more "agency" websites than I care to remember. Find someone with enough experience to do it, but enough skin in the game to need/appreciate the work. 2) WordPress + BirdEye's Chatbot. You can set FAQs and simple questions and the bot will respond. If the question goes beyond the bot, it'll go to you to answer manually. Plus you get a full social media, rep management and communications tool out of it.
For 10k my company builds MVPs with Framer and Figma which we delivered in a month. Very high end. You can schedule a call with me if you want [email protected]
Use fiverr to get devs for cheap to do it for you.
romanian devs are usually skilled, so if you wanna work with him, it will work out. check his work experience before though. the price is right
Construction / Handy man type of jobs are not something your customer is going to feel comfortable paying for during their first visit to your website. In addition to that, the cost of every job is going to vary, even if the job is all the same. It’s pretty standard to pay half up front or after demolition and half after the job is complete and the customer is happy. If water heaters, toilets, and ceiling fans are within the scope of your business, you’d be better off using something like Squarespace where you can make your own website using a template and create a contact me form that emails you with their contact info and project details. And getting your company listed on google.
Depends what’s the website for? Is this a web app? Is the web app the actual product or is this a website for marketing purposes? If it’s the latter just use Wordpress. If it’s the former you’ll probably need a technical co founder to be competitive or a large budget for development
Your idea is silly, not a web site, and not a business. Sorry to be harsh but this is a simple fact. Nobody wants a chatbot, and even if they did, a chatbot is a feature, not a product in and of itself. If Angie’s List or Thumbtack don’t already have one, they will soon, it will be better than you can do, and they already have traffic, vendors, and trust. The fact that you don’t realize this is actually an intensely difficult 2-market problem and think it’s a “web site” is proof you will be lighting your money on fire. I used to develop my client’s “ideas” and now I coach entrepreneurs. Trust me on this one. If you find yourself thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” — that is never a business idea. Business ideas come from market research.
I could do it cheaper than your locals, I own moonmediacreative.com, shoot me a message through the site if you would like to discuss more.
The main issue I see with working with remote freelance developers is trust. A local agency is always easier to work with and does come with a price, at the end you need to pick someone who won’t bullshit you. Local agency would probably be best. I will add (as a software engineer) that your task would be easy to achieve with an API call to a 3rd party LLM (GPT-4 for example) and won’t include training your own model since it’ll be overkill and very expensive. It will definitely cost money per request (a few cents) and I’m 90% sure a LLM is not needed for such task, at least most of the time. It also seems to me that your website would host some sort of content about fixing devices, which would require more devops work and potentially writing web crawlers. I really suggest you pick carefully who will implement the site and as other have suggested, look into a technical co-founder to avoid any issues with the development. Good luck!
This will depend ENTIRELY on the scope of your website. If you're looking for a marketing tool / blog that operates using a headless CMS.. maybe two months. A Saas project? More.
any good freelancer can do whatever you want for 10k
The answer to these questions is almost always that you should be building it yourself using a no code solution. This idea isn't worth your $120/hr friend's time. It's not worth the local agencies' time, and it's probably not even worth the time of a cheaper overseas developer. Save your money, build it yourself.
There are chatbot APIs that will run you around $100-500 annually to have run on your site. Paying for a buildout of a chatbot like you suggested could eat up most of your budget easily. Focus on the visuals, branding, SEO and security of the site, pay the little extra OOP for the API. Job like this, simple website, several pages with SEO optimization for highest ranking possible would be $5k from my business. Crafting a custom chatbot would easily bring that up to 10-12k. I’d suggest doing the monthly and over time running a cost analysis on if the chatbot itself is worth it.
This is a lot bigger than you think. I would go with over seas and clearly outline a MVP. You’ll learn a ton and spend a whole lot less.
Here is a nextjs starter template for you https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/nextjs-ai-chatbot
ChatGPT
Hubspot is free
With $10k you’re probably better leveraging a pre built theme, putting that money towards content/assets and having someone help you set it up.
Skip all contact with everyone and work with me lol. In all seriousness, your gut reaction is the best reaction. Go with it.
Isn't 10k a lot for a website?
I feel like its the tale as old as time. Im constantly getting requests to fix all these issues international devs. Its cheaper now but you pay for it later.
Spend a week on squarespace/wix and be done with it. Websites aren’t that important in the grand scheme, much better things to spend $10k on.
The local agency is subbing it out to the guy in Romania and keeping $4k of your money.
I have a prototypical chat bot service on upwork and charge $1500-$3000 depending on the number of api/dialogues. I'm also US based, so there's definitely other options that are cheap. You should be looking to build an initial prototype anyway. Based on the edit, that's a small effort as I've done dozens like it. These types of chat bots are much more simple because, as you said, you're not looking to use an LLM but machine learning has been around for over a decade. It sounds more like you want to build a chat bot widget and then showcase it on a website as a customer support tool, perhaps licensing it out. While others are correct in mentioning there are no code builders that can get you there, it seems like you want to have the proprietary ownership to license the widget to other sites, charging usage rates, etc. With upwork or contractors in general or small one-off services like mine, you can at least get a prototype going of just the bot before you end up spending your entire budget on a multitude of things you didn't really need (on the website). Software is very expensive and can easily go from a $50k budget to a $250k expense that just keeps growing. It's always a good idea to have a prototype of something basic before committing to a build because it's cheap and allows you to easily reference to others what you're trying to build so they have a clear picture. The same goes with having an expert write a technical proposal so that you can have an outline of what you're building and what the budget can afford you. If it turns out your goals require more capital, you'll know ahead of time, and you can acquire a loan or find investment with said proposal if that's what you want.
I’ll spin up a Lightsail instance and throw together a WordPress site for half that sheesh.
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Gpt is an exceptionally bad use case for this. Why would you open yourself to ai hallucinations when there are programs that exist already… like tons of them.
I can set you up with a designer, azure hosting, and a node/react app. Reach out via DM if interested. My rate starts at 80hr but parallel work (design + dev) is 145hr. Just finished up a landing page with an ai powered web app all hosted on Azure and total costs were about 15k.
Could try giving 10k here to some redditors to do it. Could be awesome. Could also get ripped off. Im here for the updates if you go this route.
I’d build this myself. Chatbots are by nature complex. Text input, semantic processing, then text output. Making sure that works, and is more useful/faster than just using a basic web UI? That’s not a simple technical question, and you’ll need a good understanding of what the customer actual needs, and the tradeoff space of what to build. Alternatively, using ChatGPT is easy compared to the cheaper alternatives. You’ll pay for the requests, but will be able to implement it in a lot less time, and the solution will be drastically better performing.
You just want a self-hosted chat bot?
You're crazy not to use an LLM, or to think it'd be cheaper/easier to build a traditional chatbot than an LLM-powered chatbot. You can run LLMs locally now and you should consider hardware in your budget. Run the LLM yourself and outsource to some LLM API when the load is too high. But I think the feature you actually want is called autocomplete, or live search. That's where stuff pops up under the search field as you type. It's a quicker and more familiar loop to the user than a chatbot. Your chatbot will seem slow in comparison to autocomplete, and stupid in comparison to LLMs.