DTC Outsourcing Playbook

The engineering jobs on this site, built for you — with tests that prove the work

The guides here teach you how to brief someone else. This page is the other option: three jobs I build myself, at a fixed price, where the delivery includes a test suite and evidence that the test suite actually catches breakage. That second part is the whole difference. Anyone can hand you passing tests; passing tests are worthless until something has tried to break them.

What every delivery includes

Proof, before you send anything

You do not have to take the above on trust. github.com/hello532/shop-mcp is public: a single-file Shopify catalogue and stock server for Claude, standard library only, no dependencies to audit. It is also shipped, not just written — published on PyPI and listed in the official MCP Registry, which validated that the io.github.hello532 namespace is mine before it would accept the entry. That listing answers for itself — one record, status: active — rather than being a badge I drew.

1. Store data automation — $280

Three working days. The jobs that are tedious by hand and dangerous in bulk, done against the Shopify Admin GraphQL API rather than the CSV importer.

2. Custom MCP server — $600

Five working days. Your own data or internal API, exposed to Claude or any MCP client, so you can ask questions of it in plain language instead of building a dashboard nobody opens.

3. Price and stock monitor — $220

Three working days. Scheduled checks on the pages you care about, with alerts when something moves.

Anything else — $45 an hour

The guide on fixed price or hourly routes a job by one test: can the deliverable be enumerated before work starts. The three packages above are fixed price precisely because they pass that test. A job that does not pass it — "make this faster", "find out why this breaks", an open-ended migration — gets the hourly shape instead, because forcing an open scope into a fixed price is where disputes come from. I follow my own rule here rather than quoting you a fixed number I would have to defend later.

How to start

Email coolun.337@gmail.com with what you are trying to do. Useful in a first message, though none of it is required:

You get back a scope in writing — the deliverable, the price, the turnaround — before any money moves. If the job is a bad fit, or you would be better off buying a $20 app, I will say so; that is cheaper for both of us than a refund.

Or hire through Contra, with the money held in escrow

Email is the direct route and costs neither of us a platform fee. If you would rather not wire money to a stranger on the strength of a repository, the first package is also listed on Contra, which holds the payment until you accept the delivery: Shopify Admin API automation, $280, three days. Same scope, same price, same evidence — the escrow is the only difference, and it protects you rather than me.

Why there are prices here when the guides refuse to print them. The no-price-tables rule is about other people's rates: those move by seller, scope and week, so a table of them goes stale and misleads you. These are my own prices, they are fixed, and I can be held to them. The two positions are the same position.