I posted a thread on Twitter about companies “cheating” the business model of railsdevs. Lot’s of folks replied with their takes and opinions – thank you everyone who chimed in!
A bit of background, railsdevs has two plans:
The full-time hires plan also has a 10% hiring fee for each successful hire you make via a connection on the platform.
There are a few businesses who are on the part-time plan but are clearly hiring for full-time employment roles. I know this because their messages usually include a link to a job description or mention a salary (instead of a rate/budget).
Here’s a breakdown of the different routes I can take. And my opinions on the benefits and drawbacks of each.
Sounds great on paper, but I'm not inclined to create an additional barrier for this plan. The churn is already high – I don't want to spend more of my ongoing time in 1:1 chats with folks.
@allizad suggested vetting every business that wants to use the part-time plan.
This sucks for the solopreneurs who need a Rails developer for a month or two and only can pay an additional $99 to find them. It also doesn't solve the root problem - I just get an additional $200.
But what kind of checks? What can be added that don't add friction for other customers? In theory this approach is ideal but I don't know how it would work in practice.
@stevepolitodsgn pointed out that any check can be circumvented because railsdevs is open source. So anything done in code will need to be tied to the Stripe subscription.
@ThomasCountz suggested a screening process for the part-time plan job descriptions.
I've seen a lot of success stories of businesses hiring 1 or 2 freelance Rails devs to help them on a project. And I would hate to stop offering that entirely because of a few bad actors.