A tech story
Here is a story that was experienced about a month ago when I was doing a seminar about FOSS at a local event, as a business owner if you can relate to this you should seriously think about exploring FOSS or other alternatives. For the sake of privacy I will do a broad stroke explanation , this story is in Japan
The Setup
Picture a thriving small construction company with about 50 employees. They've been doing well financially and decided to establish an online presence a few years ago. To achieve this, they contracted a web development company to build and deploy a WordPress website for them
The website consisted of a few static pages and one dynamic page that they wanted to update regularly with new information. The initial costs were as follows:
- ¥300,000 for initial setup and design
- ¥8,000 for ongoing monthly maintenance
However, the contract came with some significant restrictions:
- Only the web development company had admin privileges
- The client was limited to 4 user accounts
- Updates were restricted to once per month
The Turning Point
As the construction company grew, the owner recognized the need for website analytics to better understand their online presence and make data-driven decisions. Thinking about this potential for growth, they reached out to the web development company to request this feature.
The web development company's response was less than ideal:
- ¥50,000 one-time deployment charge for the analytics feature
- An additional ¥1,000 added to the monthly maintenance fee