Do you have any relevant experience or notable past projects? Are any past employers willing to vouch for you? Do you have a personal website and/or code repository such as github or Codeberg?

Versions and categories. Does a category mean a comic, and a version mean a language? Are files uploaded in bulk?

So, the comic is an anthology and there could be categories for each: writer / lead artist, available language, and storyline. For example, Chapter 1 on the site (or rather, Issue 1) is the first chapter in part of "The Tabula Sophonic" storyline, the lead artist is FiniteBanjo, and the available languages are English and German. Issue 2 is a standalone chapter for "Head of the Company", lead artist is someone else, available languages are also English and German. This information should be visible to users browsing the archive and there should be a database table or perhaps a simple file storing this information about every chapter. Uploaded files are images named number 1 through X, generally uploaded in bulk and ideally should be stored in separate files.

Blog and news.

Blog doesn't require images and includes long form posts from the team about whatever they feel like talking about. News entries require thumbnails and are short but important updates such as upcoming deadlines, schedule changes, collaborations, team members joining or leaving, licensing changes, etc.

Achievements.

Well, nothing really required, but I guess chapters owned, chapters read, time spent reading, comments made, upvotes on comments, Patron status, user found the hidden page, user tried to break the rules by accessing something they shouldn't, etc.

Access control.

You understood it well. I could probably help out a little bit with the Parteon API if you have any trouble with the implementation, but I've confirmed the necessary capability is there: check patrons, check patron emails, send patron messages individually. This should hopefully be the only API we have to worry about on this project.

Appearance. Do you have mock-ups, particularly for the landing page and the about-us page?

Me and the team are mulling over our options currently, but it's vitally important to get quotes now and begin the fundraising process with which to fund the development and the fulltime artwork in a few months time. While we certainly COULD proceed without that, it would put us at a pretty big personal risk.

We probably want a sort of modernist approach where light mode is clean white with black boxes and text, sharp edges, and dark mode would be a grey with white lettering and perhaps teal boxes. We do NOT want to sacrifice utility / usability for visuals. Some of the site will utilize a proprietary font that I own, but for the most part Atkinson Hyper-legible will be used.

Mobile and Firefox. I daily-drive Fennec on Android, Firefox on Windows and Falcon on Debian

While it's not exactly as accurate, there is a firefox tool in the hamburger menu under more tools > Responsive Design mode that allows you to emulate various device ratios such as iPhone, Laptop, Tablet, Pixel, etc. so as far as visuals we should be good on compatibility. Would you be able to add a banner and notification if a user accesses the site from Chromium to tell them they're in an unsupported browser?

I know that developers of many libraries and tools do allow AI contributions, for example it’s in Valibot and Vite, to which I don’t know good alternatives.

I'm okay with library dependencies using it, although I'd be willing to search for a better solution but I don't think it's really economically feasible at the moment to be limiting our options. I am really interested in Fresh from UseFresh.dev but idk anything about it aside from being similar to a React.js project that I've worked on in the past but I gave up on trying to build it myself after a while. EDIT: Fresh uses Vite as well.

My ballpark estimate is 120 hours for the initial release with the features you mentioned. Programming further updates to the website can be negotiated as needed. From what I found $58/hour

EDIT: Other quotes I've gotten are $5,000 / $14,000 / $15,000 / $38,000 so the $7,000 estimate actually seems really low by comparison. Clearly the amount of features I've requested are quite challenging.

Almost $7,000 then. Might be doable, we'll keep this number in mind when we launch fundraising. We'll probably have to put forward our own money to make it happen, most successful crowdfunding campaigns are less than $9,000 total and we're already way over that amount with just the artist team's wages for the first couple of chapters.

In case the website ever shuts down, can you then release the code with a free software license?

100% I'll be sure to put that in writing when we decide on a contractor.

For further contact

You can reach me at finitebanjo@yahoo.com for now I'd appreciate you and other users from this post reach out to me there for future inquiries. If you need an encrypted communication app as a hard requirement then I can look into DeltaChat but I've never heard of it before today so I'm not really sure about it just yet.

Thanks for the outline! Some follow-up details:

Versions and categories. Does a category mean a comic, and a version mean a language? Are files uploaded in bulk?

Blog and news. Is news meant for a specific creator, while the blog is for the website itself?

Achievements. What should be tracked for a user to gain an achievement?

Access control. To unlock a chapter, either: a user enters an access code; an administrator types their name into a form; or a Patreon monitoring script unlocks it automatically for a group of users according to some logic?

Email server. Can you tell more about this part? What do automated responses involve?

Appearance. Do you have mock-ups, particularly for the landing page and the about-us page? Maybe a design system? I can use generic daisyUI or Bootstrap components to make it look okay, but I'm not a designer myself, though I've taught an introductory design course for teenagers.

Notes about requirements:

Filesystem. I can store images outside the document root, and deny a file to a reader unless access control allows their signed-in account.

JavaScript. I'd like the front end to be a server-rendered SPA, using Preact and Vite. This means the reader pages will load and be usable without client-side JavaScript. But some JavaScript will be used for interactivity, especially in the admin section.

Mobile and Firefox. I daily-drive Fennec on Android, Firefox on Windows and Falcon on Debian, so these are the platforms I can ensure it works fine on.

No-AI. You can and should review that anything I code for your project does not include anything LLM-generated; btw, I'm interested in what tools you use for that. However, the bundle returned to the client will include code of dependencies, and I know that developers of many libraries and tools do allow AI contributions, for example it's in Valibot and Vite, to which I don't know good alternatives. I will ask you to plan the contract in a way that doesn't hold me responsible for LLM usage by other people.

Maintenance. I do write documentation for every project that I author. It's not very extensive, usually a README about installation, structure and some usage tips. Developers whom I onboarded to projects of my employers told me they appreciate it, but they rarely update my initial documentation on their own later. I'll be interested in your experience with improving this.

My ballpark estimate is 120 hours for the initial release with the features you mentioned. Programming further updates to the website can be negotiated as needed. From what I found $58/hour is an average wage of full-stack developers using my preferred technology in the USA in 2026, so this is what I'll ask.

Note that with my availability (day job, university, other clients) I can only allocate 10-20 hours per month. I use Kanboard, make periodic reports about what's ready, and we can monthly discuss the priority of what features should be ready next.

In case the website ever shuts down, can you then release the code with a free software license? I haven't yet worked on a project with a policy like that, but I saw this the idea on fedi more than once, and I liked it; this is how Firefox and LibreOffice came to life.

For further contact, do you have Delta Chat or XMPP, or how is it better to chat with you and other project members? What's your timezone, and are you ok with not very fast responses, because I don't spend much time on social media? I'm from Ukraine, EET/EEST (UTC+2/3).

This is a real concern in today's day and age, where corporations are encroaching on third spaces, both online and in person.

I've had some luck searching for coding clubs on meetup or other group event sites. For example: https://www.meetup.com/code-and-coffee-chicago/ , https://codeandcoffee.org/ , https://www.meetup.com/dearborn-coding-club/ , https://www.meetup.com/nyc-coders/

There are usually developers looking for work who you can talk to in person at these clubs, its a great way to network and get connected with people in the community who are trying to avoid the beaten path!

I suppose I'm okay with almost anything as long as the site still works on Firefox for users with Javascript disabled? I am based in the USA, currently.

I am looking for quotes for an upcoming website that will host comics for a team of independent creators. The budget is very flexible but the higher the number goes: the less likely the project will happen at all. Please be honest and realistic and post what you think this job should be priced at. Work will begin after a successful fundraising campaign in 2 or 3 months, work is expected to conclude less than 12 months from project start.

While I have dabbled, I am not a seasoned expert so please inform me of any complicating factors in this listing, please be aware that I am reasonable and that changes to scope can be negotiated.

Needs:

1. Secure filesystem for images, form for administrators to upload chapters with an assigned version or category

2. Minimal Javascript requirements for users' browser. Working navbar and footer with links

3. Fast-loading pages hosting the chapters, only rerender components/elements which change. Low overhead, minimal imports

4. Must work on mobile and desktop, primarily Firefox

5. No-AI. Human only work. You will be asked to sign a contract making you liable for the full cost of the work, damage to our brand reputation, and legal fees if AI output is without any reasonable doubt found in your submitted work. I do not engage in frivolous lawsuits, just please be mindful

6. User credential management including account creation, login, and product code input to gain access to specific chapters stored securely. Users without access to specific chapters should be unable to view them even if they access the correct url. Administrators should be able to generate unique access codes on demand

7. Maintainable by owners and future developers. Well documented notes on managing the filesystem and database would be very helpful

8. Email server with automated response capability

Wants but not Needs:

1. The following pages: front/landing page, about us page, news page, blog page, contact page.

2. Controls on the chapter page to render pages of chapter side-by-side or single wide (except for pages specifically marked as two-page illustrations on second thought this task could just be handled by the artists preparing the pages), and controls for a specific version (different languages)

3. Comment sections and different controls for administrators and moderators to remove comments and take away commenter privileges

4. User Profiles and achievements

5. Ability to frequently and automatically check a list of patrons on Patreon via API call, and automatically generate a user account with relevant access and temporary password, and send an email to that patron with the account info

What will NOT be expected or required:

You will not be expected to implement any sort of store or transaction. All hosting will be handled by the owners and administrators of the site.

What's your project, and are you comfortable with implementations based on Node.js and/or WordPress? I'm quite busy until the end of summer, but open to taking a project later if it sounds interesting. Regarding the quote, what's your country? I believe people from the U.S. should pay me the same they would their own countrymen, while for my Eastern European neighbors my rate is different. I still haven't ever used AI for coding, but I use it as a summarizing assistant when writing university notes - it hallucinates a lot but helps me fight procrastination; a skeleton with mistakes that I can correct after carefully reading the sources is better than a blank page endlessly waiting for a good first sentence.

Search locally. Try finding web designers/developers in your city first, and if that doesn’t work then check out websites of local businesses and see what developer they used (usually linked at the bottom of the home page).

Seems to me all the brick and mortar web developers are calling themselves "SEO/Marketing" consultants these days. You might have luck looking for one of those businesses geo locally.

This was really interesting. Thank you for sharing it here!

Just wanted to share this good bit in the comments here:

I hope that this is good news. The biggest strengths of the Internet are its decentralisation and egalitarianism, and the monopoly of Google search has been the total opposite of those. I am happy to see that other search engines are growing in popularity and I hope this trend will continue. Web search should be as it says on the tin, search providing links to websites, and replacing links with an AI generated summary with a high chance of malforming their content is just not the right way, dangerous for the openness and freedom of the web.

Good.

I switched over to DuckDuckGo many years ago and have never looked back.

If the search results aren't good enough, you can always use the "!g" bang to search google results through DDG.

I actually heavily disagree. One of the WORST things you can do for user experience is defy their expectations for input. E.G...

• Users expect to have characters appear, where the cursor is, when they press character keys
• Users expect to have the character in front of the cursor be removed, when they press [Delete]
• Users expect to have the character behind the cursor be removed, when they press [Backspace]
• Users expect to have some kind of submission action take place, when they press [Enter]
• Users expect to be able to click on things that look clickable
• Users expect to not have elements on the page move underneath their fingers (I.E. as they type or click things)
• Users expect the contents of their clipboard to be pasted at the cursor position, when they perform a Paste

Breaking these rules by masking certain inputs generally makes them feel HORRIBLE to use.

Banks, for example, love to do this. I hit [1], [0], and [0] on the balance transfer form, to transfer $100, and I end up with a transfer for $1.00, because the validation forces a decimal point to be injected.

I think there are niche cases where keystroke rejection can make sense, but it's basically never worth the effort. And phone numbers is NOT one of them. When I buy stuff online, and get asked for a phone number, I'm virtually always pasting it in, because the only number I give out on the internet is a throwaway, and I don't have it memorized. More often than not, it gets rejected, because it was copied as "(XXX) XXX-XXXX", and the form doesn't like the formatting, even when that formatting is auto-applied anyway, as you type.

Good form validation involves letting users enter whatever the hell they want (within a max length restriction), and giving good feedback when it's not acceptable, indicating what needs to be corrected. Also, auto-completion goes a long way, when possible.

In one case, someone completed a form a month after starting it.

absolutely not me with 200 tabs open, doing 30 things at the same time

Ahead of any validation for forms should be input masks at every reasonable step.

Make sure that only numbers can be entered into a phone field, and with the correct pattern. Ensure that postal codes can only have numbers and letters, and the letters come in uppercase even if the user presses a lowercase letter. Have a date picker available, sure, but give people the option of just typing it out, and also make it clear that the format will be ISO-8601.

Well thought out input masks provide proactive correction and can massively help avoid reactive validation that only comes up after the user leaves the field or submits the form.

This is something I really wish more sites would take to heart.

I am fairly certain I am not alone in saying that my city government has a website for giving out appointments that does not load without JS and when I do enable JS and complete the rubbish form it fails with an ambiguous error on my desktop computer.

How can even governments, which are supposed to be accessible to everyone within the country manage to push for use of their digital tools but then completely mess them up what feels like every single time?

Very cool, I want to take a closer look at how these work later. Many of them are relying on things that aren't supported in all browsers yet, though. E.g. the carousel and tabs don't work at all in Firefox.

JS was a mistake and the web was doing just fine without it /s

considering that I run with noscript on permanently, if the site immediately breaks, I just close the tab. if the site generally works, I will take the time to consider if JS is warranted. thank you for making sites that dont break the web.

I took a very bold decision and built a new version of the site using Astro https://astro.build/. It was HTML-first. Javascript existed, in web components, but only to progressively-enhance a website that worked perfectly fine without it.

My logic was thus:

1. This is a public service
2. It should work on every machine possible
3. It should work when connections are poor
4. The forms must never lose data once it is entered

…

The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood! We also saw my “keep a backend session, never lose user data” approach pay off. In one case, someone completed a form a month after starting it.

Offline cache becomes possible with PWA

Edit to give concrete example: Mozilla MDN docs read later/read while offline

I was wrong. It was not mozilla MDN. But I do remember an offline cache docs site

Oh, thanks for the recommend!

I'll be sure to have a look. I like where I've got things; but I'm always happy to discover new tools!

Have you checked mdbook? It is a quite mature program (written in the amazing Rust programming language).

Its main target is to build books (as the name implies), but chances are it can fit your use-case.

The "Rust Book" is made with this program.

That's a good point, being closer to the react api would make refactoring easier. The AI of it all is very frustrating for new projects like this. Since LLMs produce the most likely next code based on the training set, it'll take a lot of blog posts and projects on github before it masters your api, but people will be loathe to adopt it if LLMs can't do the heavy lifting for them. I don't envy your position, but I do wish you luck!

Not what you’re trying, but have you looked at HTMX?

Thats cool! I haven't seen that before.

My approach is because I specifically wanted the react DX... This would then make it easier to refactor my existing projects.

With AI, "easier" is a relative term. I wanted something that remains intuitive to work with.

Why would I use this rather than hybrids?

Svelte is good and easy to recommend. Especially over my unfinished code here.

With what I'm doing, I'm aiming for something that would work without having to use something like vite to transpile anything... if I can replace the Lit dependency (on the roadmap), it would basically be vanillajs.

I'd like to minimise the JavaScript tooling needed for creating a basic project.