Ask HN: What does $2000 in Web design/development buy you these days?

You're a broke college student with 2K to spend on adding features to your website, surely you should be able to find another broke student that would like your 2K and could do a perfectly adequate job of delivering it - especially with the potential to be involved in future pieces of work.

Not only is a really good designer / developer going to be too expensive, they probably aren't going to want to get out of bed for a small project like that, so rather than outsourcing overseas why not find someone that is in a similar situation to yourself and you can have face to face meetings with to set expectations etc.

The problem with your question is that the answer is highly ambiguous. Asking how long it will take to implement those features is a bit off; instead, you should be asking "What needs to happen to implement these features and what would you estimate all of it to be?"

Just a search feature and social networking/profile feature implies a whole gamut of underlying logic that you aren't aware of (because you aren't a developer). Depending on what your vision is, those two features alone could end up being a two month long project just for a first iteration (don't forget about iterations!)

I charge about $65 per hour for web application programming work in either Python or PHP (I prefer Python), I segment my time into 40 hour work weeks. For two months of work that would equal out to a little over twenty grand for a first iteration. That does not include going through QA, user acceptance, feature list refinement, and finally a second iteration (then a third and a fourth and so on for as long as your product stays alive).

Many non-technical people trying to get into the web startup or software startup scene see that price tag and commitment to time (through iterations) and have a mini-gestalt. They simply aren't aware of what goes into building a reliable, feature-rich, maintainable, and clean web application! This is why almost all of the successful web startups have been built by people that do the work for a living already (or some by very wealthy people that can afford it), because they don't have to go pay a lot of money for someone else to do it, they just have to pay for their living expenses.

yeah, that would be a good way to prove/disprove his worth for sure. he should put himself up against someone who charges even $50/hour with the same budget, then have the work judged by an impartial panel of experts.