“We buy $50,000 cars to look successful, then run them on the cheapest LPG to ‘save’ 50 hryvnias. Spoiler: this isn’t about cars”
A situation that made me think
Recently I ran into a situation that, by all rights, should have stopped surprising me long ago. But no — even after over 18 years in development, moments like this still make me stop and think.
A company commissions a serious piece of development. A significant budget, a large-scale project. We build the product: well-thought-out architecture, quality UI, solid performance. The client is happy, signs off on the work, shakes my hand.
And then comes the question of an additional infrastructure solution. Something small, but important for the security and autonomy of the business. The price is negligible compared to the main project.
And that’s when it starts: “Why so expensive?”, “Can we split the payment?”, “Maybe we could just rent a ready-made service?”
Here’s the funny part. A serious investment in the platform — no questions asked. But the cost of quality engine oil triggers an hour of discussion. As if sunflower oil instead of motor oil were a normal alternative, “because it’s cheaper this month.”
And this isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern I’ve been watching for years.
Why this happens: the renter’s mindset
Behind this lies a classic mental trap that shows up in business all the time: the renter’s mindset.
It’s psychologically easier for a manager to sign the company up for a SaaS service at $50–100 a month. Forever. Over a year, that adds up to $1,000+. Over two — $2,000. But those are “operational expenses”: invisible, spread across the months, requiring no decision.
The alternative is infrastructure of your own. An asset. You pay once for the setup — and from then on, the system works for you. Server upkeep costs pennies compared to any subscription.
But here’s the paradox: a one-time investment — however small — is scarier than the endless serfdom of a subscription. It’s a fear of responsibility. What you rent is “someone else’s”: if it breaks, it’s their fault. What you own is “yours”: you have to look after it. And somehow that responsibility of ownership ends up costing more, psychologically, than actual money.
That’s one facet of the problem — saving in the wrong place. But there’s another: when a person is willing to pay, but not willing to let a specialist do their job.
“Fix the car, but don’t open the hood”
Another case. A call from a new client. She tells me I was recommended to her by… ChatGPT. Seriously. An artificial intelligence recommended me as a specialist. We live in interesting times.
The task is simple: she has two websites, both about eight years old, that need fixes and updates. The standard procedure in cases like this is a support contract with a confidentiality clause. Protection for both the contractor and the client.
And then: “I won’t give you access to the hosting. And you’ll only get the dashboard as an editor, not an administrator. Start with that.”
Imagine walking into a repair shop and telling the mechanic: “Fix my engine. But don’t open the hood. And I’m not giving you the car keys. Start with that.”
Without administrator access to a website, it’s physically impossible to update plugins, clear the cache, or fix critical errors. This isn’t a matter of trust — it’s a matter of technical feasibility.
I understand where this comes from. A bad experience with a previous developer, the fear of “what if they break something,” distrust of a new person. These are human emotions, and they’re absolutely valid. That’s exactly why contracts, confidentiality clauses, business registry extracts, and professional reputations exist.
But when fear overrides common sense to the point where a specialist can’t do the work — that’s not risk management. That’s how you end up with no result at all.
By the way, those websites really were stuck in the last decade. And when the conversation shifted from patching up the old to creating something new, the tone changed completely. Because that’s no longer about fear. That’s about possibilities.
Both of these stories are different faces of the same problem. One person saves on infrastructure, another on trust. But the root is the same: not understanding the difference between price and value. And once you look closely, you see this pattern everywhere.
“A website for 200 bucks”: why is Instagram flooded with these ads?
Open Instagram. The feed is bursting with ads: “Turnkey website — $200,” “Landing page in 3 days — UAH 5,000,” “Online store from $150.” Promises of fast, cheap, and beautiful — three words that never sit together in development.
Why do these ads work? Because they play on the same psychology. A person sees the $200 price tag and thinks: “Wow, why pay someone $3,000 when I can get the same thing for two hundred?” And indeed — on the surface, the result may look similar. For the first two weeks.
Then reality sets in. The website is built on the cheapest template — one of thousands of identical ones. The code isn’t optimized. Pages take 8 seconds to load — Google sees that and buries the site so deep even the owner can’t find it. No SEO. No strategy. But hey, it looks nice.
Six months later, the owner realizes the website exists, but the clients coming from it number exactly zero. So they go to a proper specialist. Who looks at this “$200 website” and says: “It’s easier to rebuild from scratch than to fix this.” Bottom line: $200 + $3,000 = $3,200. Some savings.
Sites like these regularly land on experienced developers’ desks “for treatment.” And the picture is always the same: the business has lost time, money, and — worst of all — its faith that an online presence works at all. “We already made a website, it did nothing.” No. You didn’t make one. You bought the illusion of a website.
Where the price comes from: from an internet cafe to an M3 Max
When a client sees an invoice, they see a number. Just a figure. And they compare it to other numbers — from Instagram ads, from freelance marketplaces, from “a friend of mine promised to do it cheaper.” But behind an experienced specialist’s number stands a whole journey.
2009. A smoke-filled internet cafe, because there was no internet at home. My first commissioned website — 900 hryvnias. Deployment over FTP, animation in Macromedia Flash. Back then, those 900 hryvnias felt like a small fortune.
2026. A MacBook M3 Max with 48GB of RAM. My “colleagues” are Claude Opus and n8n agents. Systems that hold up under load, automate business processes, and save companies thousands of dollars.
Between those two points lie over 18 years of daily work, thousands of hours of learning, and hundreds of projects and mistakes turned into lessons.
When a specialist bills for 5 hours of server setup, the client thinks they’re paying for time. No. They’re paying for the years that let the specialist do it in 5 hours — instead of taking production down for a week.
For knowing how to configure Nginx so it holds up under traffic. How to secure a container. How to make sure backups actually run, instead of merely being “planned” somewhere. That’s what separates an investment from an expense.
Price vs. value: why they’re different universes
The problem is never the money. It’s whether you understand the difference between price and value.
A client who sees only the price will always hunt for something cheaper. They’ll compare you to a $5-an-hour freelancer on Upwork. They won’t understand why “just setting up a server” costs what it costs — after all, “it’s just a few clicks.”
A client who understands value asks different questions: “What do I get? How reliable is it? How will it affect my business?” And when they hear that instead of an eternal $100-a-month subscription they’ll get their own infrastructure, under their full control, for a one-time investment — they make the decision in a minute.
With the first type of client, long-term collaboration is impossible — to them, any specialist is forever an expense to be minimized. With the second, you build a partnership where both sides understand the value of what’s being done.
“Cheap infrastructure” is an oxymoron. Like a cheap parachute. You can save — but only once.
When a business picks the cheapest option for its critical systems, that’s not saving. That’s a problem postponed.
A “cheap” server will sooner or later buckle under load. A “free” service will leak your data. The “cheapest” developer will build things so that the next one spends twice as long just figuring out what’s going on.
Summary
Some things look simple. “Just deploy a script,” “just make a website,” “just set up a server.” For a specialist — sure, it isn’t hard. But that “simplicity” is the result of years of learning and thousands of hours of practice. For a business, it’s what lets it operate, earn, and grow. And that carries a price of its own.
The “Lexus on LPG” — a luxury car converted to run on the cheapest autogas — isn’t about any specific client or any specific developer. It’s about a systemic error in thinking, where a serious business tries to save on the very thing its existence depends on. Because when the engine seizes in the middle of the highway, nobody will blame the owner who kept buying the cheapest oil. They’ll blame the mechanic who poured it with their own hands.
Quality costs what it costs. And a parachute is either reliable or useless.
