>How do you assess the real level of complexity of a project in order to determine its price ?
One thing I should mention is, as I said, I'm a super experienced programmer [1], so I analyze each project and do the work of dissecting into what needs to be done. I provide links to helpful APIs and help provide suggestions of ways to tackle the problem.
So once I know what needs to be done, I do a bottom up estimate of how long it would take for me to do each microtask. I then multiply each time estimate by the market hourly converted rate for a San Francisco Silicon Valley startup software engineer and sum. I put that bid into the Slack channel, and if someone good takes it, that's that, but if nobody bites, I raise it by ~$15 every so often.
There are 400+ people in Slack currently, and at any given time there's 20+ experienced developers online. Tasks are usually snatched up pretty quickly. The bottleneck in the system currently isn't experienced devs, but qualified businesses and entrepreneurs.
[1] But not a truly great one, like Ada Lovelace, Adam D'Angelo or John Carmack.
This could also be a useful evaluation/interview tool where the microtasks represent real-world problems, versus the pages of FizzBuzzing and stripped-down tasks currently in vogue.
That said, this personally seems useful to me as I'm working on a scripting/templating language that should vastly simplify fulfilment of these non-codebase dependent tasks, and this gives me a new way of thinking about that.