Ruby on Rails Fixed Price Quick Start Service

What is the Quick Start Service?

The Quick Start Service is a way for you to manage risk when getting started building a new web application or a new web portal. Here is how it works:

  • You pay me at my normal consulting rates to develop a specification document and preliminary design for your project. This process can often be done in a few hours if you have a very good idea of what you want. The "product" of this task is a unified document that is an agreed upon work order (with my fixed price bid) with the specifications and preliminary design as appendices. The cost of this first step in the process is non-refundable regardless of whether we can not agree on price and requirements for the project.
  • With required input from you, I will develop your new web app (usually in less than one week) and temporarily host it on one of my own servers.
  • We will go through a process of your approving the web application, hopefully with only moderate changes if you feel that it does not meet the requirements. After accepting the web application implementation, you pay me, and I send you the source code, design notes, and all resources to run the Rails web application. If you need help deploying Rails, nginx, memcached, etc. on your server, I will help you at my normal consulting rates.

What happens if you, the customer, do not accept the implementation? Easy! You simply do not pay me any additional money. After a short period of time to allow you to change your mind, I will delete my working materials for your project, and we will remain friends :-)

What types of projects are appropriate for the Quick Start Service? Unless you are an existing customer I am unlikely to accept large projects from you. Small and medium size projects (with perhaps 2000 to 4000 lines of Ruby, RHTML, etc.) are best. Remember that it is good development technique to first identify the key bits of functionality, develop those completely, get user feedback, and then proceed to add additional functionality to a system. From my point of view, the best Quick Start Service projects will be small but will have "follow on" projects, as required, and depending on your budget.

What can you, the customer, do to lower the cost of the implementation and increase the probability that you will me happy with your new web application? The most important thing for you to do is to have a clear vision of what the system will do and how people will use it. You should be able to provide me with:

  • A one paragraph "elevator ride" explanation of what the system will do and how it will benefit users.
  • A longer two or three page description of the system - this should contain many short 1-paragraph 'use cases' describing how people will interact with the system.
  • If the web application is to be built around an existing database (MySQL or PostgreSQL only, please) you can reduce the project cost by providing me a database dump with the schema and test data.
  • If possible: supply me with HTML and CSS mockups of what you want the system to look like. Next to providing me with a development database, this is one of the best ways for you to reduce the amount of my fixed price bid. I am not a graphics designer so any graphics logos and custom CSS that you can provide me at the beginning of the project will improve the final look of your web application.
    If possible, have most of this ready when you first contact me.

How I determine my fixed price bid. After we have spent a few hours (which you are paying me hourly for) determining the requirements I will have a very good idea of how many hours your project will take and I calculate a price based on my current hourly rate. If you do not seem to have a clear idea of what you want, I will increase my fixed price bid. On the other hand, if you have done your work and have provided me with clear direction and HTML and CSS mockups, I will lower my fixed price bid.