I regret my website redesign

>You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.

Yes, definitely. In my experience, the smaller scale makes it easy to manage, so you can nip problems in the bud more quickly.

>>There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.

>I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.

Yeah, I think it's important to be vigilant to some degree, but some people are effective at suggesting useful improvements. TinyPilot's in-house devs, for example, will frequently suggest improvements to designs or architecture that will cost more up-front but will reduce costs long-term, and I love those kinds of suggestions.

If the agency had a history of suggesting improvements and correctly estimating the cost of implementing them, then I'd be more open to their suggestions. But their track record was consistently to expand scope and run late, so I wanted to constrain scope as much as possible.

This is a bussiness arrangement. Normally this works by you saying some things you want over some timeframe, and letting them work on it.

The part of this story where things go off the rails, is that by the middle of it, it was clear the agency wasn't delivering on their deliverables or really making progress. Most people would make some sort of change at that point, either terminate or set modified expectations - definitely not blindly give more money.

Its really not about trust, its about whether or not they do the job. There could be many reasons why the job doesn't get done, many might not be malicious - but these people aren't your friends. You are buying something from them, if they dont have the goods, then they dont have the goods and its not a sign of lack of trust to move on.

More importantly, why is a bug on code they haven't even delivered yet considered your responsibility. This is not billable hours, this should be included in the original feature hours. If he were requesting a new feature and calling that a bug, sure. But it sounds like they were the one's introducing new features against his protests.

Slightly tangentially, this is why I refuse to do work with companies that strictly bill hourly. Give me a project estimate with strictly defined scope. Split the deliverables up into three-five milestones (so either party can cut and run if things are not going to plan) with partial payments on milestone completion. Hourly billing comes after for support contracts and supplementals.

Yep, exactly that.

And, for a dev agency (I'm not as familiar with how design would want to structure this), you'd either need _very_ detailed and specific requirements before we consider quoting the project, or we're going to need an up-front discovery phase (that will run a few thousand dollars anyway) to produce those detailed requirements and specifications, before we can even give a quote.

Fixed bid projects do feel like they create much more of an adversarial relationship than a collaborative one for working on a project, and when we make fixed bids we _definitely_ price a lot of the risk into the bid (and we're up front about that).

Whats your overall margin? I would assume that you are able to build it for $100,-?

But yes i think you did not had enough experience working with agencies. They oversold you as the sales people usually do and than you fix their issues. You should have stoped as soon as it was clear that they lost some agreements when moving from the nice ceo to the developers.

I was working for a company who was doing development for other companies. The team setups are cost optimized. Like the dude who smokes weed every day and only gets 45k / year salary but is sold as a fulltime senior developer. Or the working student who has 2 years frontend experience but 0 years experience who might get sold as junior or normal developer.

Or people who are part of your project for 2 month, the company knows that they will go on maternity leave and they just replace one but neither tell you that or really assume thats just fine. Its not fine. They need again time to onboard and it costs you money.

All of this is more or less shitty, but the companies going to contractors normally offload all of software developer hiring, onboarding, teaching etc. So its a tradeoff. A trade off companies have to decide on.

But i would never ever do this as a small company as you are, ever. And i only did this with a small company who was having 5 employees with a very clear target architecture and specific goals. And they also tried this shit on me with the 'i have someone who doesn't speak that well german or english and is not that good but we can offload him on that project' and i spoke up after 1 week because i'm not paying for someone i can't communicate issues clearly. Red flag alert was there immedidatly.