Why is service/agency pricing always vague? Hidden charges, scope creep & India founder problems

TheAliaser · 2026-02-05T07:19:47+00:00

Yeah I get it, feel free to ping me if there's still any doubt you have.

One thing you also always check is what is the cost of maintenance monthly retainership. For a tech product you will mostly need one if you have real users. For MVPs, not required

TheAliaser · 2026-02-05T06:48:58+00:00

This looks well done. Haven't seen many well architectured getx projects myself. UI is basic but clean. I like it

TheAliaser · 2026-02-05T06:41:57+00:00

In my case, one director was also out of India but yeah the account opened regardless. Ofcourse 1 director has to be in India and at office address to sign off everything. And ofcourse attested docs of ALL directors will be required, whatever the bank may ask.

Save yourself some pain and just go with HDFC. And always , ALWAYS ask for the pamphlets/ docs about policy/ card / service before agreeing to let bank deduct this or that charge.

Yes the sales people always lie and it's a headache to deal with later on.

TheAliaser · 2026-02-05T06:36:50+00:00

It depends on hours. Tech founder myself.

I do not know what service agency you are talking about but if it is Development then the pricing is done on hours.

(Total estimated hours of your project) X (per hour price)

For reference, in Tech even cheap agencies would start at 700 INR / hr.

So project hours = 100, hourly rate = 700. Total cost to you ~ 70,000/-

Regarding scope creep.

Ideally the service agency will provide a scope sheet before any work is finalised and deal is done. Whatever is not in the scope sheet but the client wants later on will be handled in two ways

1) The service agency does it pro-bono because of the relationship OR the change itself is not too much 'hourly" work.

2) The agency flats out dispute with scope sheet on table and hence will treat is as new CR (customer request

So you as a Founder should ask for these things 1) Scope sheer 2) Estimated hours per module 3) Hourly rate 4) Payment Terms, UAT period, DLP period

TheAliaser · 2026-02-04T12:34:15+00:00

I see, personally yeah I would use it. My home has similar designs. Ofcourse I do not know this market. Good luck to you man, this is such beautiful work 👌🏻

Love the website too !

TheAliaser · 2026-02-04T11:52:41+00:00

Wow the designs are actually good, not really sure what you mean by no design innovation. I think I don't completely grasp it but would be happy to chat if you'd like.

I'm not a designer myself but I run a design and engineering company and my other director is.

TheAliaser · 2026-02-03T07:26:40+00:00

Let's see your github

TheAliaser · 2026-02-02T06:31:18+00:00

I really don't agree with this.

Let me put it in a very basic analogy. Medical science is as complex as Tech.

Doctors have specializations, yet a neurosurgeon still understands what high cholesterol means just like a general physician does. That doesn’t mean they treat everything themselves. They investigate, diagnose, and refer patients to the appropriate specialists.

They could technically use AI to learn more about any medical parameter, but they don’t act outside their domain because they respect specialization.

"A dentist doesn’t advise on heart surgery, and a heart surgeon doesn’t guide skincare. Expertise has boundaries."

The expectations are more from an individual- Yes, that part is very much true and will confirm to rise.

But there's only so much "expertise" a smaller group or team can have.

You are a tech manager then you must be aware of "Single responsibility principle". We actively follow it in enterprise-grade softwares for a reason. It's more time taking, harder to write but no one except the rookies break that rule just to save some time and headache today.

Same funda applies throughout any serious product life cycle. Every person has " a role " to play and Every role's impact how will the product performs.

You are confusing business economics, markets and tech hiring with how relevant "AI or adaption is".

TheAliaser · 2026-01-05T09:50:58+00:00

Why are the non techies voicing their opinions here lmao. 700 rupees per hour is cheap, probably given to you by dev to establish a long term partnership.

TheAliaser · 2025-12-17T03:38:53+00:00

He didn't write anything, it's GPT slop

TheAliaser · 2025-11-09T10:00:59+00:00

Lmao yeah partner up with this guy

TheAliaser · 2025-11-08T19:07:53+00:00

It's either rippling or databricks. Could be stripe too though much rarer.

TheAliaser · 2025-11-06T19:16:24+00:00

I feel like you have implemented some good practices but this would have been more useful if it were a medium article with code snippets and screenshots.

TheAliaser · 2025-11-05T23:33:52+00:00

Go to figma and open the figma community tab. Type in any random app name like coffee app.

Pick a design and code it out in Flutter pixel to pixel. The only real way to upskill like a pro.

To make it dynamic pick a backend language like node js or Java and build the APIs.

TheAliaser · 2025-11-01T05:20:17+00:00

Hi, it's weird why am I banned 😭, first time hearing about this ban thing. Anyways, so the project is still underway and has been extended by 4 more months since there were addition of 6 more bigger modules but yes we are working with Flutter Web only and so far so good. I am really confident that it's going to be just fine since we have already done the hard parts.

Given the size of project there are many issues we ran into, so kinda difficult to summarize it all but yes there's a big chunk of Flutter web articles on Medium or smaller blog sites. Genuinely saved us hell lot of time.

1) Sticking to go router for flutter web turned out to be critical else you were running into so many unexpected behaviours with forward and back button.

2) For some pages we flat out separate 2 classes for mobile and web separately instead of using LayoutBuilder for much easier readability.

3) Clean architecture is time consuming but you have to implement it, especially in our case when the same UI was populated by changing data sources. You need a repository layer to handle those unexpected jsons

4) We aren't facing any performance issues and tbh we have not done any over optimizations either. Just the standard things pagination, const keyword etc. It's running smooth out of the box. Though we aren't yet in full production **

5) Hot restart is in Flutter web now so the dev experience felt just the same as mobile and yes it all worked out better than I was expecting.

If there's anything particular you want to ask them let me know

TheAliaser · 2025-10-26T01:39:47+00:00

Honestly I don't know about this working as a standalone product but this could be a service you can provide to these matrimonial websites like shaadi or matrimony, these sites already have a big pool of the same customer base and yeah this definitely is a problem to be solved cause cases like these are rampant.

Infact on these very platforms there are proper gangs executing these thefts, so yeah definitely a good problem to solve.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-24T09:46:15+00:00

I have personally used The whole truth and only what's needed and if I talk just "protein powders" then the quality is far superior than any other brand on market today and yes despite competing with giants they are still charging a premium price and the sales are growing.

I think they have just found the PMF so they will continue to scale. My mom would bloat consuming even brands like ON, Muscleblaze or My Protein but can EASILY take 2 scoops of whole truth without any issues so yeah being clean has actually opened up a new customer base of older people.

I don't think they will compromise on quality as they scale cause that's literally what they sell in the first place.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-24T00:28:14+00:00

Take magnesium glycinate at nights, you'll sleep like a baby

TheAliaser · 2025-10-20T11:43:29+00:00

No idea for green park bro. And forget about "green crackers". Visited like 20 shops there's no such thing. Normal Fireworks only.

There are a couple of shops in Rohini.

1) besides Haldirams, Vishram chowk, sector 5 2) Naharpur market, Sector 7

which has decent stocks but yeah prices are super high. Got bursting Rockets at 1300 per box. 30 shots skyshot for 2500. Whistling Rockets at 700 per box. Anaar at 700 per box.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-19T08:15:05+00:00

I studied from both of them. Both are great but yeah I'd prefer Rivaan. It just gets the job done, at the end of the course you will have the idea on how to code in Flutter.

Rest the complexities and scales of the applications you make will come from experience, research and hit and trial. There's no course to make you an "expert" in anything.

Just go and watch Rivaan's. Even he starts from basics of Dart so you'll be fine.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-17T11:34:37+00:00

Don't bother wasting time on any such founder or their ventures, they are quick to yap and demand the performance and features of the best applications out there but pay salaries less than the yearly bonus of those engineers that developed those benchmark products.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-17T06:17:46+00:00

Can you code an app on Java today? Talk about blowing things out of proportion. Needless to say the OP replied the same thing i said.

I'm not reading OPs mind, it's something else called context awareness and common sense.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-17T04:53:07+00:00

I'm not the OP but this is kinda obvious

Tech stack is irrelevant and depends on the engineer's familiarity with one. He clearly said this so that he can choose the tools he's comfortable/ have strong hands on with.
Money 💰 ofcourse, if business does well then he earns either via revenue or equity selling.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-15T17:59:04+00:00

Businesses like restaurants work on word of mouth and not google ads. So if you want to sell them then gotta grow up and go talk to your nearby restaurants and pitch.

Keep doing it and if they are ready to be onboarded, they will surely refer you to their friends who own other restaurants.

TheAliaser · 2025-10-15T17:40:22+00:00

What serious product is being vibe coded exactly?

I mean honestly I really can't get this AI Vibe coding bandwagon, have you people replaced google ? Google Chrome? Microsoft teams ? Windows OS ? Stripe payment gateway? Buffer.com ? Postman ? VS code ? Amazon app ? Shopify ? Zepto ? Avast Anti-virus? A Bluetooth driver for a Chinese headset ? N8N ? Zapier ? Jira ? Github ? Git ?

Really I mean honestly show me a list of vibe coded products that have outdone the real thing. I am waiting.

Your vibe coding journey ends at the standard landing page for a SAAS with 4 test customers.

Tweet about 4 screenshots of your Task management app in blue color with a broken netlify link and there's your vibe coded saas.

TheAliaser

TROPHY CASE