This is Andrew from MetaLab. I just wanted to say thanks for all the compliments on the design. I hope that you guys will take it for a spin and let us know what you think.<p>Quoted from cominatchu:
"The 'under 10k' price tag is misleading because it does not include the opportunity cost of the web designers time. In other words, one has to calculate (the hours spent by Metalab web designers * their normal hourly rate) and add this to 10k to arrive at a more accurate cost for building this site."<p>Yes, we really did build it for less than $10k. Our key expenses were: Rails development (1 developer a few hours a week), a SliceHost server, and some custom icons we hired out. We're planning to break it down in more detail on our blog in the next little while, but I'd like to debunk this a bit here. You're absolutely right about the cost being higher if you consider what it would normally cost at a full consulting rate, but I feel like that's kind of fallacious logic:<p>If you learnt how to woodwork, built a bookshelf, then told your friends that it cost you $15 (the price of the wood and a couple of screws), they aren't going to argue that the true cost was $500 (the hours spent learning woodworking or a carpenter's rate).<p>If a founder who was an incredible programmer paid himself $1,000/month during the early months of his startup, would you say that his time really cost the company $15,000 (what he would have charged at a consulting rate)?<p>The point isn't that someone with no technical skills can do this for 10k (after all, this is Hacker News, and I assume most of you are highly skilled in the field), we're just pointing out that we managed to create a business by pulling a few extra hours a week over 6 months. We didn't have to quit our day jobs, move to the valley, or build a board of advisors - we just went ahead and built it. This isn't to say that it's an especially complex app or that it is some sort of technical feat, just that a little bit of money went a long way.<p>I don't think taking funding is always bad or anything, especially small seed funding like YC. Sometimes advantageous ideas need money to make them happen. The point is that most of you already have many of the skills required to build things, so funding really shouldn't be a barrier to entry. If your idea requires more money than you have, boil it down to the bare minimum and build it within your budget. We could easily have decided that we wanted to build the best invoicing app ever, figured out that invoicing was a 1.3 kagillion dollar industry, secured some funding, built up the stakes, then gone crazy with features. We could have convinced ourselves that we needed to close down our consulting business, hire a full-time Rails developer, and move in together. Instead we took a simple idea that we felt wasn't being done right, boiled it down to its core, then built it when we had the time.