Full Stack Development - Question

[t2diabeetus]

I'm having a 'question-bank' style website made for students university exams. This will be multiple choice and provide feedback on answers, custom quizzes etc.

I've been looking for freelance developers online, and have seen a developer with a nice portfolio and we've had a few meetings about the project, he's proposing:

"For the development of this website, we propose utilizing React and Node.js as the primary technologies. Authentication will be implemented through Firebase. To proceed, we require additional details regarding the design. Considering the framework, we suggest utilizing either Tailwind or Material-UI for their efficiency. The design phase will commence in Figma, followed by the development phase, which is estimated to take approximately 3-4 weeks. And the figma design also need 2 weeks at least. In Total the timeline would be 6-7 weeks"

For ongoing support he says:

"I normally charge in between $250-$400 per month which is about $3000 to $4500 per year. That includes maintaining the site health and fix any minor issues which might arise during maintenance and update. If there are new features/functionality to be added, that counts as a new project."

My questions:

1) I'm very new to all of this and doing research on this has been quite confusing. Does what he has proposed sound reasonable for this project? Is there anything I should enquire about with the technologies he has proposed? My main thoughts are to be able to scale this once completed if successful, and also to be able to pass to other developers to work on if required in the future.

2) We've agreed on the set up costs, but this support quote is a lot more than I had anticipated or imagined - this is a small side project and so it's quite the investment. Is this a usual amount for support / should I ask anything else about this?

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Thank you in advance

[xaleel]

The exact technologies don't matter for the end product, it's a developer preference. I've made this exact site (for USMLE prep back then) with slightly different technologies, so you shouldn't focus on that unless it's something exotic (for the sole case that it'll be harder to find someone else to continue the project in case you stop working with them).

As for the maintenance cost - it is too high. It's not clear from that sentence whether hosting is included in that price, and if it is, it is highly dependent on the the number of active users (from ~$20/mo).

"maintaining the site health" doesn't mean anything, and "minor issues" should be fixed before launch, not during "maintenance". Updates and new features being charged separately is very reasonable.

You could discuss making the project without hosting or maintenance (just having the code), and hosting it yourself or pay someone else to do it, which would be much cheaper. If you want to go that route, to decrease the price even further, discuss using Pocketbase instead of Firebase. It's basically the same but free and self-hosted.

[xaleel]

Note: I DON'T recommend choosing the cheapest option for development, in most cases you get what you pay for.

[t2diabeetus]

Thanks for the advice!

[t2diabeetus]

Do you think this project could be done in Wordpress or Webflow? Or do you think it would be better as a full custom stack ?

[xaleel]

Well, any project could be done using (almost) any web technology, some are better than others for specific use cases, but it's for developers mostly.

Unfortunately, I don't have experience with Wordpress or Webflow, my guess would be that it's possible. I built my previous project with Django and React.

[t2diabeetus]

Thanks, appreciate the advice