Plone Costs for Non-Profits (Was Re: [Plone-NGOs] Initial thoughts ona "Plone for Nonprofits" bundle)

[George Lee]

Martin Aspeli <optilude at ...> writes:

>
> George Lee wrote:
>
> > For the much lower end (say, $2000-$5000), what are the typical systems and
> > costs for ongoing support?
>
> You cannot pay someone who makes their living selling services and
> support and are not in the mood to give charity $2000 for a completed
> project.
>
> ...
>
> These economics have nothing to do with Plone, though, just with
> people's time and opportunity costs.


Yup. I think I'm more curious at this point about ongoing support. Say someone
completes a project, maybe $2000, or $5000, or $10000 -- now the small non-
profit wants to maintain the site. That might involve some occasional backup,
rescue work, minor changes in the ZMI. What might be a bare-bones support plan
by a third party person, how much would it cost?

I want to be able to tell an organization I work with: "After I'm gone, you
should expect to pay a bare, bare minimum of ___ for hosting, ___ for support.
If you want some real development work done, maybe ___ for ___. This is who you
should talk to who could help do that work. And by the way, these costs are/are
not specific to Plone, compared to drupal or ruby on rails django ..."

Also, are there suggestions for how I can gauge how much it would have cost to
hire someone to do the development work I did for free? I'd love to imagine I
pulled off a $5,000 or $10,000 project =) but don't have a strong idea how to
judge the
quality of my work, how much a typical developer would have charged for the
features I developed, etc. so I can give the organization a sense of future
costs after I'm gone. I'm one of those hobbyist do-gooder developers out here,
run youth groups by day and use pdb to step through Five at night ...

Peace,
George