Is custom development market dead?

#1

I’ve been consulting and building web apps for clients for about 5 years now. In the recent times, my focus has turned towards e-commerce web apps.

Recently, I’ve been getting really strange queries to build e-commerce websites as low as $100 because the client has spoken to a bunch of other developers who are offering their services at $100.

I think this is an effect of the no code movement and the fact that translating a design to a website doesn’t take much now that we have wordpress site builder tools like elementor and divi.

In the e-commerce world, People who can setup a shopify site now call themselves “developers”

I used to run my dev shop under the brand instadukan (dukan means shop in Hindi)

Given the nature of the market I’m thinking its best to turn to products for the e-commerce community.
so I’ve revamped the site from a dev shop to a product offering

and starting out a community for business owners and service providers
where business owners can talk to each other and grow…
and service providers can find business owners to work with

What do you think of my assumptions and the path I’ve taken?
also let me know what you think of the new site :)

cheers!

#2

Hey Zeeshan!

What do you think of my assumptions and the path I’ve taken?

I suppose you are thinking in the right direction. Even though experienced developers will always be valuable and well-paid, the market is becoming overcrowded day by day. it is easy today to learn to code. Anyone can start the career of a web developer. The Internet is full of guides, the GitHub is full of free plugins and libraries which save us hundreds of hours of work and turn coding into playing with lego :smile:
And there are also new fantastic no-code tools of course. It makes a developer’s skill even less demanded.

also let me know what you think of the new site :)

I did not understand what is Instadukan about. It would be more clear to me if it has the word “community” in the <h1> heading.
There is also that "bots thing. It made totally confused. Why do you sell a product on a community landing page?

Also, I suppose a community does not need a landing page (until it is closed). You just show the content of the community to sell it to newcomers :slight_smile: Like we do here on https://broadwise.org/