Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers

[marcusquinn]

I'm determined to build a business model on what you're all doing with Cloudron now.

I'm thinking al-la-carte menu-pricing for managed app hosting and services.

One of the hardest things for us all to do is cost and price these things, which makes it the best opportunity IMHO.

I'm thinking along the lines of a price for setups and then for monthly maintenance support. Kinda like a Sys Admins & Developers union.

Of course people can always do more for less - but I'm working on the costing and pricing aspect of this as a way for everyone to have a rate-card you can use for reference, with accommodation for discounting and affiliate sales commissions if you so desired.

I'm thinking of a hybrid model, where Cloudroners can offer both the setup and management of the Cloudron Apps where people want the community versions, and rates for the setup and monitoring of their respective enterprise author hosted solutions so we are equally contributing back to those app developers in bringing them enterprise customers where appropriate too.

I feel like all this should have been done 20 years ago and Sys Admin been a professional rate expectation like any other profession - but only Microsoft seem to have cracked that, at great cost to freedoms.

So, thanks to @girish and @nebulon 's vision, I can see a bright and fun future with you all, and doing all I can for the presentation side of things for your esteemed review in the next days and weeks.

[jdaviescoates]

I'm totally up for installing, hosting and supporting Cloudrons for people and need more paid work!

On one inspired night I whacked up the beginnings of https://selfhost.cloud/ to begin offering hosted Cloudrons... but not given it much time of late (in part because I started having wobbles about it not being open source, hence starting the thread about that).

And really I've been thinking it'd be much better to Do It With Others (who e.g. have the skills to automate much of it all using the Gandi and Hetzner APIs).

Also, I really think Cloudron could do with having an intermediate offer between "2 apps and 5 users" and "unlimited apps and users". I think something like what I call The Startup Stack on https://selfhost.cloud, i.e. "up to 10 apps, unlimited users" would be great.

[marcusquinn]

Nice, I can see collaboration opportunities. I'm looking more at bigger businesses though, in the £1m-£50m turnover bracket.

Also thinking, the more Cloudron enables a reseller model, the more Cloudrons to Admin , so the support needs ratio remains while revenue and profits should rise.

Working on this every day now, will share more soon.

[murgero]

@jdaviescoates Can I assist on that? I have infrastructure on OVH, Kimsufi, and DO.

[marcusquinn]

@murgero Yup, I'm thinking along the lines of templating services for retainers with al-la-carte menu pricing, so anyone can do it, as a team, collective or independently. Cloudron covers the stack admin, we bring more clients.

Basically, the VAR/MSP business-model but with a rate-card so everyone can achieve respectable rates and retainers that are relatively standardised across providers and clients.

I have some good email flows for email marketing to pick up clients too, so will move onto that once I have the whole rates and presentations side of things sketched out.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers:

Nice, I can see collaboration opportunities. I'm looking more at bigger businesses though, in the £1m-£50m turnover bracket.

Probably wise from a business point of view

[jdaviescoates]

@murgero you very likely could assist, yes

Do you think you could help automate the set-up using Hetzner and Gandi APIs?

I like Hetzner because it's cheap, has a great user interface and it's powered by 100% renewable energy.

Gandi are also renewably powered and are one of the more ethical registers, I like their No Bullshit philosophy:

https://www.gandi.net/en-GB/no-bullshit

So to start with a least I want to use them.

In the future hopefully offer other 100% renewable servers too (perhaps with Netcup, even cheaper, but much worse UX, 1984 hosting not quite as cheaper but really nice small company - although the biggest host in Iceland - committed to free software and free speech etc).

Ideally I want to have our own co-op owned servers in a co-op owned data centre (which there are in the UK), but bootstrapping with Hetzner and Gandi seems like a good first move.

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates Smaller businesses really should be doing a lot themselves anyway.

In my experience the penny-conscious need all the self-managed economies and confidence they can get, whereas the big-ballers just need it done and covered within the time it takes to approve a quote.

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates TBH with the Fibre speeds we get in Jersey to every home, I'm tempted to make my next move with room for a mini-server farm

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn understandable!

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers:

@jdaviescoates Smaller businesses really should be doing a lot themselves anyway.

Many simply don't have the in house people with enough tech confidence.

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates Yeah, and that's where our jobs come in. My main job is design & UX. Every user problem or question i see as our problem to solve. I can see we thing similarly on that anyway.

Convenience features are just time-saves for focus on the more valuable data-structure designs in systems that always have a mix of common and unique with every business. I like to solve the common so users can focus on the unique.

[robi]

@marcusquinn said in Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers:

Convenience features are just time-saves for focus on the more valuable data-structure designs in systems that always have a mix of common and unique with every business. I like to solve the common so users can focus on the unique.

That's called automation.

[JOduMonT]

@marcusquinn said in Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers:

I feel like all this should have been done 20 years ago and Sys Admin been a professional rate expectation like any other profession - but only Microsoft seem to have cracked that, at great cost to freedoms.

RedHat and SUSE also cracked it..

So how it goes ?
I'm also in IT since forever; start programming at 8 years old in BASIC then building network with IPX/SPX, ...
anyway
I also had this kind of idea, like where old Geek back wise kids to gain confidence and clients;
it was in 2020 when the C.H.A.T.O.N.S. started.