I suspect the reason is the fact that not all developers live in the bay area, and $60 is a good money for them, and could worth more than 2 days.
Also if you code for fun anyways, you might as well build what you need, and get chance to use that shiny new technology while you do it. You save money, have fun, improve your resume, share projects with your friends and communities for kudos, all at the same time.
Just pay more. Developers care a lot less than you think about what it is they're building. I mean sure, we'd all like to build something cool. But not if it means leaving money on the table.
Knowing what everything cost is not the same as being able to build. Sure you know a for loop, that dont make you a developer. You may just be able to know when the dev is lying, but really..
What client is going to pay $7-10k for weekend dev's work and "fun"? Who fixes the inevitable bugs afterwards? People pay developers to work on their ideas to exact spec, not to experiment and hack.
You're looking at the market from the supply side, you need to look at it from the demand side which is far more important.
I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..
it's a general problem for developers to pay x money for something they could build themselves for y hours where y hours are worth x*10 money, even if you will not use y hours to build it yourself. But since the world has lots of people in it if even 10% of the people who can build something decide to pay for it that can be a profitable business.
Aren't most developers in the world paid a salary or day rate and thus are paid for their time? What incentive is there for them to "hurry up" rather than sandbag?
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