I tried making a Freelancer post, as I used their service once years ago and it was generally pleasant, but I was immediately bombarded with AI Applicants and an AI Recruiter grilling me for answers to its questions. Immediately deleted the post and the entire account.
Where do I go to get a quote for some work done by some actual human beings? I don’t need AI, I don’t want AI, if someone automate their quoting process then I’m out because I’m not gonna fuckin negotiate with the hallucinating vending machine.
EDIT: I attempted a post on UpWork.com and there is far less AI response than on Freelancer, but I’ve still declined all offers so far because they failed an important filter question. Still, I’ve been able to get quotes! FINALLY! Looks like my website could potentially be built for some number between $5,000 and $38,000. Very interesting. As some commenters have suggested, I’ll check out some options in local cities, though I doubt I’ll find much in my small studio’s price range. EDIT2: These quotes are bogus, I think. I’ve been seeing the same phrases repeat across multiple proposals “AI is a powerful tool but no replacement for creativity”. I went through so many proposals and not a single one looked like a real human capable of adhering to a no-ai policy.
Thanks for the outline! Some follow-up details:
Versions and categories. Does a category mean a comic, and a version mean a language? Are files uploaded in bulk?
Blog and news. Is news meant for a specific creator, while the blog is for the website itself?
Achievements. What should be tracked for a user to gain an achievement?
Access control. To unlock a chapter, either: a user enters an access code; an administrator types their name into a form; or a Patreon monitoring script unlocks it automatically for a group of users according to some logic?
Email server. Can you tell more about this part? What do automated responses involve?
Appearance. Do you have mock-ups, particularly for the landing page and the about-us page? Maybe a design system? I can use generic daisyUI or Bootstrap components to make it look okay, but I’m not a designer myself, though I’ve taught an introductory design course for teenagers.
Notes about requirements:
Filesystem. I can store images outside the document root, and deny a file to a reader unless access control allows their signed-in account.
JavaScript. I’d like the front end to be a server-rendered SPA, using Preact and Vite. This means the reader pages will load and be usable without client-side JavaScript. But some JavaScript will be used for interactivity, especially in the admin section.
Mobile and Firefox. I daily-drive Fennec on Android, Firefox on Windows and Falcon on Debian, so these are the platforms I can ensure it works fine on.
No-AI. You can and should review that anything I code for your project does not include anything LLM-generated; btw, I’m interested in what tools you use for that. However, the bundle returned to the client will include code of dependencies, and I know that developers of many libraries and tools do allow AI contributions, for example it’s in Valibot and Vite, to which I don’t know good alternatives. I will ask you to plan the contract in a way that doesn’t hold me responsible for LLM usage by other people.
Maintenance. I do write documentation for every project that I author. It’s not very extensive, usually a README about installation, structure and some usage tips. Developers whom I onboarded to projects of my employers told me they appreciate it, but they rarely update my initial documentation on their own later. I’ll be interested in your experience with improving this.
My ballpark estimate is 120 hours for the initial release with the features you mentioned. Programming further updates to the website can be negotiated as needed. From what I found $58/hour is an average wage of full-stack developers using my preferred technology in the USA in 2026, so this is what I’ll ask.
Note that with my availability (day job, university, other clients) I can only allocate 10-20 hours per month. I use Kanboard, make periodic reports about what’s ready, and we can monthly discuss the priority of what features should be ready next.
In case the website ever shuts down, can you then release the code with a free software license? I haven’t yet worked on a project with a policy like that, but I saw this the idea on fedi more than once, and I liked it; this is how Firefox and LibreOffice came to life.
For further contact, do you have Delta Chat or XMPP, or how is it better to chat with you and other project members? What’s your timezone, and are you ok with not very fast responses, because I don’t spend much time on social media? I’m from Ukraine, EET/EEST (UTC+2/3).
Do you have any relevant experience or notable past projects? Are any past employers willing to vouch for you? Do you have a personal website and/or code repository such as github or Codeberg?
So, the comic is an anthology and there could be categories for each: writer / lead artist, available language, and storyline. For example, Chapter 1 on the site (or rather, Issue 1) is the first chapter in part of “The Tabula Sophonic” storyline, the lead artist is FiniteBanjo, and the available languages are English and German. Issue 2 is a standalone chapter for “Head of the Company”, lead artist is someone else, available languages are also English and German. This information should be visible to users browsing the archive and there should be a database table or perhaps a simple file storing this information about every chapter. Uploaded files are images named number 1 through X, generally uploaded in bulk and ideally should be stored in separate files.
Blog doesn’t require images and includes long form posts from the team about whatever they feel like talking about. News entries require thumbnails and are short but important updates such as upcoming deadlines, schedule changes, collaborations, team members joining or leaving, licensing changes, etc.
Well, nothing really required, but I guess chapters owned, chapters read, time spent reading, comments made, upvotes on comments, Patron status, user found the hidden page, user tried to break the rules by accessing something they shouldn’t, etc.
You understood it well. I could probably help out a little bit with the Parteon API if you have any trouble with the implementation, but I’ve confirmed the necessary capability is there: check patrons, check patron emails, send patron messages individually. This should hopefully be the only API we have to worry about on this project.
Me and the team are mulling over our options currently, but it’s vitally important to get quotes now and begin the fundraising process with which to fund the development and the fulltime artwork in a few months time. While we certainly COULD proceed without that, it would put us at a pretty big personal risk.
We probably want a sort of modernist approach where light mode is clean white with black boxes and text, sharp edges, and dark mode would be a grey with white lettering and perhaps teal boxes. We do NOT want to sacrifice utility / usability for visuals. Some of the site will utilize a proprietary font that I own, but for the most part Atkinson Hyper-legible will be used.
While it’s not exactly as accurate, there is a firefox tool in the hamburger menu under
more tools > Responsive Design modethat allows you to emulate various device ratios such as iPhone, Laptop, Tablet, Pixel, etc. so as far as visuals we should be good on compatibility. Would you be able to add a banner and notification if a user accesses the site from Chromium to tell them they’re in an unsupported browser?I’m okay with library dependencies using it, although I’d be willing to search for a better solution but I don’t think it’s really economically feasible at the moment to be limiting our options. I am really interested in Fresh from UseFresh.dev but idk anything about it aside from being similar to a React.js project that I’ve worked on in the past but I gave up on trying to build it myself after a while. EDIT: Fresh uses Vite as well.
EDIT: Other quotes I’ve gotten are $5,000 / $14,000 / $15,000 / $38,000 so the $7,000 estimate actually seems really low by comparison. Clearly the amount of features I’ve requested are quite challenging.
Almost $7,000 then. Might be doable, we’ll keep this number in mind when we launch fundraising. We’ll probably have to put forward our own money to make it happen, most successful crowdfunding campaigns are less than $9,000 total and we’re already way over that amount with just the artist team’s wages for the first couple of chapters.
100% I’ll be sure to put that in writing when we decide on a contractor.
You can reach me at finitebanjo@yahoo.com for now I’d appreciate you and other users from this post reach out to me there for future inquiries. If you need an encrypted communication app as a hard requirement then I can look into DeltaChat but I’ve never heard of it before today so I’m not really sure about it just yet.
Interesting, do estimates of hours also differ a lot? Do responders who have more senior qualifications estimate particular tasks as more difficult, according to their experience? I’m fairly confident that my estimate matches the tools I’m familiar with, but at the same time I’m neither still junior nor yet senior and might have underestimated some tasks, particularly those related to communication inside the team, because I’m used to working solo.
When I made my post I requested flat rate estimates, so I’m not sure. The largest difference in price points doesn’t seem to be qualifications, almost random actually. Users with higher estimates seem to have questions about the hardware, though.