: Outsourcing backend work I would like to make a website that has a lot of the same features and functionality of www.quibids.com. I need user accounts, payment processing, various products that

@Sarah324

If you are willing to spend money on cheap labor for this project on freelancer.com I would suggest you rather stick your budget on red in Vegas. If you win you can take a holiday. If you lose, you wont have a website - just like if you use your cheap labor - but you'll have far less of a headache.

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@Deb1703797

"1. Am I off base or am I approaching this correctly?"


I'd suggest that you're off base. Your current process:


Make a huge feature list that results in a complex site build.
Find someone to build everything as cheaply as possible.


A better process would be this:


Set a budget based on what you can afford to pay.
Ask several developers what features you can have for that amount of money.
Be prepared to accept that their answer will mean scaling back on your vision.
Tell your designers to create a template based only on the launch features.
Hand the design to the developers to build those features.
Launch the site.
Add other features later based on testing, user demand, and profit.


This not only saves you money on a project you don't yet know will prove popular; it allows you to launch faster too. I recommend that you read "Getting Real" to learn more about this approach.


"2. Where can I find someone locally (in the US) who would have knowledge
of everything I'm trying to accomplish
that could check the work that someone
is doing on freelancer to ensure it's
quality?"


You don't save money by hiring a cheap developer to build a complex project and paying a more expensive developer to check their work. You save money by hiring the better developer in the first place and paying them to build the minimum number of features required to get your site launched.


"3. How much do you believe I should be spending on a website described above?"


Pay what you can afford. Build a simple site. Launch it. When you have more money, add more stuff.

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@Candy875

This is like any engineering project, for example, designing a new car. You want it to be fast, cheap and reliable. You can't have all three. Pick any two. You want cheap, professional-looking and presumably, reliable, so your customers don't have problems. Pick any two.
It sounds like you want someone who could do the work themselves, or is experienced in managing people who do the work, to oversee the freelancer. As yours looks like a commercial enterprise they are probably going to want to get paid a bit too. Look for a web design company and ask just for project manager services. However be prepared to pay.


You also probably need someone to look after the servers. If you're successful, as you hope, then the servers are going to get overloaded and you want them to keep on working so your customers don't have problems. So you have to have a solution that scales up in the first place, and then someone to deploy new servers as needed. Alternatively you could pay more money to have a solution that scales transparently (new servers are automatically brought online).

3. Without digging into the precise requirements, that 30K to 150K figure sounds a bit high, but not totally unreasonable.

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