Poll: Freelance Availability for Retainers

[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.