Chris Dean’s Personal Website

I recently found rentacoder.com and decided to have a look at how the site works, and how it may be of use to someone such as myself who does to odd bit of freelance web development work.

Rent a coder’s setup is pretty simple, people who need jobs done post the job plus a price range which they are willing to pay and coders respond with bids withing that range for doing the job. The original poster selects one, the coder does the job and gets paid and rentacoder take a cut in some form as payment.

Unfortunately the problem with this site is that in general people have unrealistic expectations of what their money will buy them, and as such set celings that are generally below what is reasonable for the job.

The good thing with this site is that registartion fees are minimal or non-existant. So if you don’t get a job you don’t have to pay.

Compare this with say Elance and you’ll see you have some more reasonably paid jobs there but everyone has to pay to be there. In some cases this will ensure a higher quality of serious coder and job poster, however I dislike ongoing billing as you could potentially go for weeks without a job and still have to pay.

So which is better?

I don’t know I expect Elance though will grudingly pay for a subscription to test the service over the coming weeks – watch this space for an updated report with my experience of both services.