Ask HN: Would you spend $30K on a landing page?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29464987

by ge96 • 5 years ago

13 37 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I know my answer, and I'm aware you can find themes for like $20.

The landing page is a single page thing, jump links on the page, then a form to collect an email.

With regard to responsive design, cross browser stuff being a given/addressed... $30K?

Point of this is I'm trying to see if there is any reason to think this is reasonable.

Hosting/certs is a minor concern could be done by you or provider. No changes to the site after it's done.

I would also add that you're a startup/don't have cash flow, maybe some kind of investment/seed money.

newsbinator• 5 years ago

How likely is the landing page to make me $60K?

ge9611• 5 years ago

ha... in this case it did not help any/past tense.

warrenm5• 5 years ago

I'll spend as much on a landing page as it takes to make NOTABLY MORE than I spent on it

If I can make $1000 for $20, I'll spend $20

But if I could make $100,000 for $30,000 - dang straight I'm gonna spend $30,000!

ge9611• 5 years ago

Yeah maybe part of the question is when do you do it. This landing page was not amazing, a slider, couple of left/right sections, a form to collect an email... I just have a hard time rationalizing that to be worth that much.

warrenm5• 5 years ago

How much did it earn after being put in place? Was it more than it cost?

s_severus• 5 years ago

My initial answer is "hell no" but on second thought I maybe need more context. As others asked, how much do I expect it to generate? How much do I have to play with? Am I a BigCo with an end of year departmental budget to burn?

Even then, 30k for a single page, which I assume is static, is kinda ridiculous. The only justification I can think of is very, very good design from an expensive design agency.

For the dev work we are talking paying someone $300 / hour for over 2 weeks. Seems out of my reality.

ge9611• 5 years ago

very, very good design

It wasn't

sergiomattei• 5 years ago

Then? You already know the answer: it’s unreasonable, period.

warrenm5• 5 years ago

How do you know "It wasn't"?

Did it achieve its purpose?

Did it make more than it cost?

sharemywin2• 5 years ago

I'd be happy to make it for you for like 27K and you'd save 10%.

ge9611• 5 years ago

haha I'm just trying to explain to a person what they got was a waste of money, oh well

sharemywin2• 5 years ago

maybe they can save a screenshot as a jepg or something sell it as an NFT

muzani2• 5 years ago

I'll do it for $24k.

full disclosure: will probably outsource all the work to upwork or toptal

Now that I think of it, $24k is a year's salary for the average senior developer here. So I could actually stretch that out quite a lot.

ge9611• 5 years ago

I was looking at different salaries by profession in a third world country (thinking may end up there someday). It's interesting how software is not a high paying role there. I'm thinking it's demand but yeah. So if you were to "make it big" there I think you would need money coming in from other countries over the internet which hey, Starlink maybe.

poulsbohemian2• 5 years ago

Would love to know the context here - is this what someone offered as a project bid?

Spending $30K might make sense if the landing page just part of the deliverables. For example, I can imagine if you went to a marketing firm and they are assisting with branding, copywriting / editing, syndication, social, etc and the landing page is just the most obvious deliverable of the bundle, then... sure, you could spend $30K really fast.

ge9611• 5 years ago

No it's past history, possible there was marketing or something. Main point is we're sitting at -$300K and this is one of the reasons

More issues than that, at one point AWS bills were 10x of what they should be. Mostly the thing had bad market reaction.

Case of check reality vs. your personal beliefs/hopes.

poulsbohemian2• 5 years ago

Got it. If I was auditing someone's books and I saw this, I'd say that either someone got completely suckered (sorry) or they were getting some kind of kickback / the vendor was their cousin and they were basically funneling them money. A static landing page with no other deliverables or not part of any larger project shouldn't be more than maybe a couple hundred bucks.

Adrig• 5 years ago

Not sure if it OP's reason to start the topic, but not long ago a designer on twitter made a bit of turmoil by offering to design a landing for 20k and use it as an example in the course he was making. Turns out he sold it and a couple more since then at the 20k-40k range, so I guess some people really have this kind of money to spend (he's focusing on web3 right now, so there might be an explanation there.

unbanned• 5 years ago

No. Use a WordPress theme. Pay $1000 for SEO. Call it a day.

cm2012• 5 years ago

Absolutely not, build it in squarespace or instapage. Hire a cheap designer for $1000 to customize it for you. That's what I did for my agency website that we do $10m a year in revenue through.

moooo99• 5 years ago

Would like to add Webflow to the list of suggestions

popfastful• 5 years ago

free build it in alovez.com , this is my landing page https://www.alovez.com/bing

bern4444• 5 years ago

I'll do it for 20k.

rad_gruchalski• 5 years ago

Back of the envelope calculations: $30k, say they charge $150/h. That $30k is 200 hours. That is 25 man days x 8 hours. You have a designer, copywriter, probably a product manager, customer rep and a coder involved in this.

Sounds about right. Maybe you need a cheaper agency?

XCSme• 5 years ago

I would spend $1k on the site and $29k for 6 months doing whatever I want.

You would get the exact same results for $1k and $30k, the only difference would be the developer's profit.

peanut_worm• 5 years ago

For a landing page? No I can’t imagine I would ever do that. Maybe for an entire website but not a single page.

andrei_says_• 5 years ago

Am I using it to launder money?

Ask HN: Would you spend $30K on a landing page?

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