Ask HN: Developer-as-a-Service?

2 gerardojbaez 2 7/17/2025, 4:44:37 PM
I’m currently testing this. One customer is already paying $2,500/month for development services. I’m wondering if I should provide my freelance services this way.

Like with DesignJoy, only one active task at a time. We use GitHub to manage almost everything. CI/CD is configured so deployment is a breeze. Each issue is a task. We use GitHub projects (kanban-style board) to manage the backlog and task stages (todo, in-progress, done). Big projects are broken into milestones and stages; each milestone or stage corresponds to one month of work.

Another benefit I see is that the costs is clear to the customer; he can budget properly and may pause things as needed. I also don’t need to spend time preparing estimates/quotes (which I’m not good at, and I don’t enjoy doing).

I find this works well for people looking to build MVPs or small to medium web applications. There are no long-term contracts or strict project scopes.

What do you think? Any feedback and discussion is welcome.

Comments (2)

aristofun · 2h ago
Modern web design is better commoditized than software development. For example, you need to paint typical pictures for every new blog post, press release etc.

But you're expected to build a blogging software only once, and any fixes/bugs are unexpected in scope and complexity.

Unless you take advantage of your customer (nobody else can fix that complex system that you left him with) - it doesn't look sustainable to me.

khurs · 1h ago
Sounds like a competitor to existing platforms like Upwork/Fiver etc?