This is a good idea, but the execution is distracting. What are you selling me, a slack bot or the pleasure of donating to charity?
What I’d suggest instead is a clear message of “high quality slack bots for a flat 5000” and a prominent note that all proceeds go to the charity. Maybe you could also mention that when it comes time to pay, you’d like me to pay the charity directly, but you don’t have to lead with this. The charity is the icing on the cake, but you’re building the cake on icing.
It would be an expense and would ergo be 100% tax-deductible (e.g. a reduction on $5000 of taxable income). There is another aspect relating to whether the firm gained an asset but that applies to both scenarios.
Honestly, I like this model a lot, but I think the focus is like 2:1 charity:slackbots, where I'd like to see the reverse. For example, more examples of slackbots you've made, how long it might take you, and maybe throwing in the app store thing unless that's a big deal, so businesses can get the value out of the bot as simply as possible.
Basically, I would recommend focusing on value instead of the charity (despite the fact the charity is the most delightful part -- it's still a price point businesses need to be _sold_ on, not just pitched on).
I really appreciate the feedback hawkice. Totally get that. Will do that for the follow around. To answer some of your questions:
* I made the bot for my startup [0]. It supports interactive messages (buttons, dropdowns), slash commands, and @ commands. Put another way, I use (and have knowledge of) pretty much all parts of the Slack API.
* You're getting a backend with the bot. This backend could just save stuff into a database or do more sophisticated things.
* I'm happy to work with the non-profit, ScriptEd, on some content marketing material so that the person or company that sponsors this gets public recognition.
* Timing - I'm doing this in tandem with other things. Obviously depends on what I get but let's say roughly 2 months.
* We're pretty close to getting our startup's app in the app store. I'm happy to help with this process now that I'm more familiar with it.
Assuming 2016 is when they started working on this, that is the correct date. It should convey the first date of publication and not be some listing of what years it is copyrighted.
Getting something on an app store is publishing, not quite the same as writing it which is all he's offered. If you're publishing the bot you'll also need continued support and development, something nobody would throw in for a flat 5k.
Would you like him to come up with the idea and market it as well? ;)
Chiming in as a rep of the nonprofit - happy to answer questions about our work! We operate in NYC, San Francisco, and Oakland. We're also looking for a few more volunteers to teach web dev in high schools - and especially in Oakland! Apply in the Bay Area at https://bit.ly/ScriptEdSFBAYvolunteer or in NYC at https://www.scripted.org/volunteer !
Do you have plans to scale out? I'd volunteer time but I'm not near any of the cities you currently work in. (For others who are in the same position -- inquire with your city / church / local refugee support org, you may find there are similar local initiatives for refugees.)
Also, this being (I assume) a weekday daytime commitment, do your volunteers get typically get their teaching time 'donated' by their employers?
Hi! We don't have formally announced plans to scale - though if you send me a message at becca@scripted.org I can chat with you more. I'm fairly well connected with other orgs nationally that I might be able to recommend to you, depending where you're located!
Some of the companies our volunteers work for have paid volunteering time included as part of employee benefits - however that amount of time is usually 1 day / month, which is less than the amount of time we ask people to volunteer (2x a week, for 1.5 hours each session). Most commonly, our volunteers employ some flex time and make up the hours they spend with us by either coming in to work earlier, or staying late. It does require manager / company support to get approval to do so, however!
I like this. A long time ago I offered to add features to TortoiseCVS (that alone probably tells you how long ago it was) for people who would donate (much less than $5000) to a charity that was important to me. I did it because at the time the TortoiseCVS build system was a PITA to get working, I had already gotten it working to offer patches that would scratch my own itches, and most of the other requests I saw on the mailing lists were not hard.
It garnered a few (promises of) donations... I never did follow up to see if the charities I specified had gotten them. But I was young and happy to do the patches anyway, so it felt like a bonus.
I work as a software developer for an NGO and we sometimes get coders who want to volunteer their time to us. Quite frequently, this turns into a lot of overhead for us with little to show for.
Given the choice, I'd prefer this model.
Donation cash is the sweetest thing an NGO can have, and doing development work in exchange for a donation like this seems like a really cool way to raise it.
Just to clear up a bit of confusion, the company making the donation has no tax advantage over just paying this guy directly. In many jurisdictions there would be a tax disadvantage. Add that many firms would never engage in such a relationship because it has a confusing, legally dubious compensation and accountability structure.
Further, why not just charge the $5000 and donate it yourself? Why the gimmick?
I think the presumption is the tax incentive. I wonder if setting up something like "gofundme" but for this sort of transaction, would simplify accountability.
So you donate/pay X, a non-profit organization, then they send the work to one of their contributors to build. This way you don't have the, "I paid so and so, but for something some other person built".
For comparison, I write Alexa skills (close enough IMO). I charge about $1200/day so $5k would be about a weeks worth of work. Seems reasonable to me given the scope described in the post.
Seems reasonable for a freelancer. If you're doing less, you can work easier and worry-free as an employee.
I'm 19yo, building software as a freelancer and earn 520$/day. If it would be less, I would try to get an employment. If you factor in employer's contribution to your pension plan and health insurance, sick days and insurances for freelancers e.g. IT liability insurance and income protection, this money is spent before it's earned. And you have to make sure that you always have enough contracts and that they don't interfere with each other.
I don't think everyone has to live such a life. It's a great relief to be in an employment without having to think about making money all the time. I chose freelancing because I want to choose what to work on and don't need any security for now, but I can imagine to work for $4,500-5,000/month in the future when I have kids and mortgages to pay for and need security.
The problem I have with freelancing is that you start to measure your life time in your hourly rate, because the time = money equation is ever-present. One has to be mature to resist this temptation, sometimes I'm not able to do it. It's a constant fight between the attitude that money isn't everything and the impression that it actually is.
I have an off topic question that you might be able to answer. Have you figured out any programatic way to configure your Alexa skills? It's not supported by CloudFormation. It seems like the only way to do it is via the console. Thanks!
Hey koolba dopeboy here. Great question and a huge point of learning for me as I posted this.
I'm not expecting to build a greeting bot. I'm not expecting a build a trigger bot. I'm offering to build something much more complex that might have a host of integrations and perform some form of sophisticated logic.
I'm deliberately keeping my scope wide so that I get some creative propositions. But to your point, it needs to be worth $5k and I'm willing to make it so.
This bot is to be written in Django and Python and run on Heroku which makes it fairly similar to web development with that stack, albiet with a different UI.
Google says median web developer salary is $65k/yr or $30/hr, and at $30/hr, $5,000 is 167 hours; or 4.1 weeks (at 40 hrs/wk), or roughly a month; now -> sept 30th, though that is crossed out in the article.
So $5,000 is within reason for that skill set, but do slackbots actually involve that much work? If you haven't seen Github's chatops original talk from four years ago it's worth watching, or at least reading the slides, along with Hubot; the product and its features/interface, as well as its code. There's a decent amount of code involved for Hubot, and Github paid for its development (over far longer than 4.1 weeks, mind you).
The pay is there and the work is involved enough to take that kind of time, but I can't answer if this particular offer will lead to any work, nor how involved that work would be, so whether it would involve stuffing a few strings into an existing framework, or a whole lot of new development; in turn making it a good or bad deal for the buyer, I also cannot say.
Depending on what else the Slack bot does, it could be just a few hundred lines, in addition to a premade Slack bot framework to streamline the API calls.
I was on a team that built a Slack bot in Powershell - she announced the number of incident tickets from each team's Zendesk queue, in the respective team's Slack channel. This helped drive awareness and SLAs.
Leveraging our team's in-house Powershell modules for Slack, Zendesk, and other internal Powershell tools meant the bot was only several hundred lines - not much more than a foreach with a config file.
It's not even remotely a good answer. You may charge $200/hour and take a week to build simple HTML/JS web-page (portfolio/landing sort of thing, for example). Good for you, but no way I'm paying you 8000 bucks for something that some school kid can make for me for $20 and an hour.
Unless you are a brand and can charge whatever the fuck you like for your work — things typically have a cost. You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well.
(And FWIW, I don't know, maybe it's ok kinda price in USA, but to me all this doesn't sound like a $5000 deal.)
>You know how much a cup of coffee costs, a laptop, a car, a house. Chatbots and web-pages have their market price as well.
You are thinking that people charge some amount derived from their costs. But it's more like people charge as much as they can (as the market allows) and the actual costs are only important as a lower bound - there is no higher bound.
It seemed like you were enumerating things that would be considered a cost, as if to imply something like "my costs are so and so because I need to afford X and Y, and my rate is based on my costs". Now that I'm reading it again, I guess it's indeed not the most obvious interpretation.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that helping some less fortunate schools teach coding is really going to have a negative impact on your pay. But by all means keep bashing something that is actually doing some good.
Honestly, I did not like that at all.
How about the people who need that $5K and want to write a bot to get food for their family?
If someone is willing to buy that bot, they will be more inclined to pay you to do that since is "charity" than the dev who need food. If you want do donate, it's OK donate as much as you want for anyone, but brag/sell your services for charity just degrades our profession.
What I’d suggest instead is a clear message of “high quality slack bots for a flat 5000” and a prominent note that all proceeds go to the charity. Maybe you could also mention that when it comes time to pay, you’d like me to pay the charity directly, but you don’t have to lead with this. The charity is the icing on the cake, but you’re building the cake on icing.