I want to create a website for my family to create a family tree. I want there to be a reddit like discussion area. The website will essentially be a bunch of squares that can be created with a profile pic and linked to ither boxes. When you click on the profile it will have links to their facebook and other socialmedia or info if know.
Posted Nov 29, 2023, 5:50 AM UTC
For a simple website, I start at $2,000. But what you described isn't a normal website. This is a family tree builder, the hard part is building an interface that allows you to add, edit and link together the people. You don't want a 'simple' website, you want a 'simple' interface and that is difficult to build.
Since you don't have an example, I would start with a design phase to figure out what you want and how it looks, that's more money. I'd go with the $10k guy. That includes a lot of time for planning and functionality that I anticipate you want, but haven't scoped out yet.
Your cheap option is to build it in Power Point, Google Slides or as a PDF, then put that online. You don't need a website for this.
I want to give people a website they can go to and participate in building the tree.
Google Slides can do that. It's online and people can add to the slides as needed. Otherwise I'd be looking in the 5-10k range for something usable.
Sorry, but your brief description misses a ton of details that would be needed to do a proper analysis.
No, I really just want a very simple website.
This is not a simple website. A simple website sis pure HTML and CSS. You cannot accomplish what you're describing using bare minimum tech.
What you are describing needs:
You can get much of this done pretty fast with Next.js + NextAuth + Prisma, but you're looking at at least 40 hours of work.
@canbot, please listen to this advice. I have a software engineering degree and 10 years of experience, 4 of which I have been freelancing. Just because something looks 'simple' doesn't mean that it is. If you want a precise estimation you need to provide precise requirements.
Just because it’s simple to describe, doesn’t mean it’s simple to make. It’s like if I said “I want a simple two bedroom house, just like the others in the suburbs .” Number one, there’s a ton of details that are being glossed over. Number two, there’s a lot of work that needs to go into building it, even if on the outside it “just” looks like a box with a few windows and a roof.
Ancestry.com
I don't want to get nickel and dimed for ridiculous things, and then have my data held hostage when I want to migrate.
You sound like you'd be a really horrible client.
Because I'm not a sucker? You sound like a shyster. Based on the vote counts is seems like the majority of devs are shysters.
You can expect to pay more than what you expect lmao
Id say bout tree fiddy
$5 ~ $500k. Depends how good you want it to be. For $5, I give you a notepad and write the word “website” on it.
Any time you go on the lower end (especially under $1k-$2k), you increase the odds of wasting your time, or getting a really poor end result.
Just because it doesn’t need to scale, it doesn’t mean that it is simple. It can still have plenty of complexities. Design and user experience are also a big factor and there are agencies that charge on the upper end of that pricing scale, just for a bit of design, with no code at all. Of course that isn’t what you need, but all of this sort of thing is subjective.
If you aren’t ready to spend $3k-$5k, I don’t recommend you do this. Better to lose out on $15 for a domain, than hundreds, or thousands in the long run.
I promise you, if you hire someone for under $1k, or $2k, you are at high risk of being scammed, or the end result being extremely poor. It is not impossible, but you should accept the risk and be willing to outright throw the money away if it doesn’t work out.
Look up Geni, pretty sure it’s free.
I already bought a domain. Sunken costs and all that.
Unless the domain cost you $5,000 or more, it's barely sunken.
Have you looked into some free existing family tree makers out there?
Familyecho.com and kintree.app are two examples of free online tools purpose-built for family trees. They both also allow for collaboration and sharing.
As long as a string.
This sounds like an interesting project. Do you want each users to be able to log in and edit their data or will there be a single user who will be adding and editing data? Also, let's say each user can log in to their account, how should the tree be presented? I mean, family trees often starts from from a single person and then the tree grows from there. So, if you log in, you will be the starting point and the tree will grow from you, but what if your relative logs in, will the tree grow from them or will everyone just see the same, basic tree of the whole family and just be able to edit their data?
Any user can edit any data. Initially there will only close family using it.
While personalized trees would be nice, I am not trying to make something complicated. Just one static tree for everyone.
That simplifies it quite a lot so all you need is a simple CRUD app with user authentication. That shouldn't be too expensive, most of the time will be spent designing the website. 2-3k is a reasonable price in my opinion. Now, if that's outside of your budget, maybe there is some room to lower the price with more basic design... you would have to talk to some people and get some quotes.
Depends on a lot of things really. But anywhere from 3-5k. At least my agency would charge you in that range. Also, have you thought about maintenance?
Since uptime is non critical I figure I can manage the mantenance.
Hm, idk about that. I guess there’s a way yeah. What’s your budget? Do you want to talk further in DMs, I think I can help you with this project of yours.
Most of what you want can probably be found as an open source offering - for example;
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/8rmeri/self_hosted_family_tree/
Thank you.
Are there any self hosted(you manage your own data) solutions, might not need to re event the wheel here.
Just get quotes.
I can think of how to make this a re-usable Software-as-a-service product, or how to give you a simple interface to edit text files and upload a photo for each person.
Or I can point you at how to do it with free products.
I would definitely try to mock it up first with google docs and something like Obsidian, a markdown editor that is free. With the mermaidjs library you can make flow charts pretty easily. ANd if you sync the obsidian source markdown files with something like dropbox and give everyone access to it, it will be fairly shareable if not perfectly robust to simultaneous changes with multiple editors at the same time.
I'm just trying to get a ballpark to decide if it is even worth the effort to get quotes. To get a real quote I will need to get very detailed with the request and I'm not there yet. I think the 2-3k is an honest ballpark and it is pretty clear that a lot of people want to put out astronomical quotes to drive up the market because they work in it.
For me a large motivation for this is the desire to have a website, any website, to learn from it and practice some coding. It is hard to get motivated to learn something when you don't have any practical application for it. Making small changes and upgrades that have an immediate impact is priceless. So I am not too interested in free products, but there are some suggestions about how to build it that I will look at first and see if I can make it work.
I appreciate the honest feedback.
Either you pay the developer hourly or lump sum, they'll decide. You know that you can achieve what you want with ancestry.com, right?
That depends on their experience, where you live, and what features you want, do you want it to be editable by you? Going to come back and have someone edit for you? Are you wanting a lot of input on design or are you ok with just letting the developer go?
Are you paying for the domain? hosting?
If you are paying less than 500 you are probably underpaying someone.
Not really enough information to give you a reasonable quote
I can build it for you. I would use UltimateWB as the backend, and then add some custom coding. It already has a built-in feature for comments/discussion. Please message to discuss the details for a quote. Thanks.
Possibly more than 10k, but it really depends on what exactly you're asking for, and you should not view that as a premium. It's a reasonable price for the feature-rich experience you envision. Businesses regularly pay 10k to agencies for simpler wordpress sites. You're basically asking for your own exclusive social media site, with added features.
If you're asking one person to handle a minimum viable product, from start to finish and from top to bottom, then that will include graphic design, system design, development, hosting the site, hosting and configuring a database for storing individual user profiles and forum threads, secure authentication and authorization for each user, a custom visualization mechanic, a forum, and probably an admin UI that allows at least one person to moderate and maintain records. You'll probably also want someone whose services you can retain for possible maintenance.
If you're storing sensitive information, security is an even higher concern.
Compare that to a one-page non-interactive website made for a consultancy. It consiststs solely of the words "***** does not accept and will immediately return **** packets. We will not respond to unsolicited emails or phone calls. Thank you." Their company graphic is just above, and there is nothing else. That was $75 to put up and incurs a $30/month site management fee.
Probably about seven tbh
What’s your budget? Because I’m already thinking that will be your biggest issue. You’re asking for a full stack application. While things sound easy when you say them, they are often times far from it to implement. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got quotes for 10k. If you get one for $1k you’re just burning your money and won’t be usable in the slightest.
You could probably do it with WordPress tbh. So technically full stack but really just a CMS with comments
If it’s just a family tree though you don’t have to worry about scaling. At most it will have what, 300 users? Different story if you want the users to just link their socials are the family tree to do the work of figuring out relationships by scraping and analyzing connected social media accounts. If it’s all form data from a user though, where is the hard part?
Really sounds like a bootcamp final project.
Being a bootcamp final project doesn't mean it's fast and cheap. If it takes say 20 hours, a freelancer will charge those hours.
Of course, but $10,000 is a reach unless this guy wants a lot more functionality than anything he is even remotely asking for.
Now if he wants even the basics to be set up with an amazingly custom UX and design sure, but doesn’t sound like it.
I agree yes, 10K wouldn't make any sense.
The person taking the job will also have to create a functional design. 10k is indeed a lot, but a 3k - 4k seems a decent budget.
Zero data analytics. Literally just user created profiles, user placed on the tree. With literally a text box for user input data.
I personally would expect $2-3k for this. You could probably find somebody willing and capable for less, just might take them longer.
React and Firebase would be perfect for this.