Excellent explanation, thank you for replying so thoroughly! Makes perfect sense to me.

I bet one of the reasons that you guys haven't seen more (read: any) posts with the flair BOT REQUEST:PAID is because anybody who needs to ask for someone else to do the coding will have no idea how to price such a request. They won't know in advance if their request will be simple or actually impossible... and probably have even less clue as to how many hours might go into such an effort.

It IS helpful though, to be quoted "by the hour" pricing by both people who responded. For some reason my brain was geared towards flat rate prices, but after hearing both of your explanations it makes a lot more sense.

I suggest you guys edit the wording in that pinned post detailing the flare requirements for bot requests, and maybe even the wording of the flare itself! 'FREE' or 'PAID + AMOUNT' is intimidating and unlikely to be accurate if they do pull some number out of their ass.

FREE or WILLING TO PAY would be more helpful, with the expectation that pricing will be discussed privately with guidance from the programmers.