To me, the question is, can you build a better software team than your current product provider has? If you are planning to hire developers as if they are just construction workers, you're in for a bad surprise. Plus, attracting talent to such an industry would be very hard unless you are willing to pay high amounts, often with equity.
If you're going to hire one guy to start, check their portfolio to see that have build apps from scratch, and evaluate the quality. Many can't ship.
Hey folks - this is a new product I had a lot of fun hacking together.
The color schemes are generated by GPT4, which does a surprisingly good job at putting together good looking combinations.
The schemes are then sent out to our X account, which has about 150k people interact with the schemes.
These schemes are then ranked by engagement. A lot of people ask if feeding in the top schemes into GPT4 improves the output, but surprisingly, it does not. At some point, I will probably look to build in some kind ML scheme generator to optimize for hits.
I usually charge per day or per week. If it's a few hours, I just tell them it's not worth my time.
The locality of the customer matters a lot. Usually, I will factor what it would cost for them to hire a full-time engineer (not just salary, but also overhead). A $120k salary will cost the company $200k, or $90 per hour. Then I'll add a % on top since I'm not getting days off, paid vacation, long-term security, etc.
That kind of reasoning helps with stingy customers. Otherwise, I just give a flat rate to solve their problem.
For customers that need me long term, I also ask for a monthly retainer to keep availability for them, for meetings, emergency bug fixes, etc. Otherwise, you're giving them the perks of an employee without them properly compensating you.