And you just signed up to write that.

Have they been around since 2010, or 2012 like Crunchbase says?

You shouldn't worry about that. Their app is so horrible that nobody wants to copy it.

I'm also very interested in this question.

Are you using Twilio?

We evaluated Twilio, but decided against it due to lower call quality. Their gateways are virtualized in the cloud and this can lead to timing issues or hollow/tinny sounding audio. Twilio also lacked their SIP endpoint (not sure if this is still in beta) at the time we started building Close.io, which would have allowed us to do native calling. We ended up working with Plivo (another YC company) and have been happy with our choice.

did they make 15% of the $30M?

From their web page, they only make money if there is a hire:

http://developerauction.com/for_employers "If you end up hiring a candidate within 6 months of viewing their profile, we will invoice you..."

Note the phrasing "142 startups... submitted over $30m in job offers." Sounds like if company A bids $200K for SuperNerd, and company B bids $250K for SuperNerd, they'd count that as $450K of submitted bids. SuperNerd may have declined both offers, so income might be zero. See the "Vanity Metrics" section of this article (but ignore its title):

http://nickoneill.com/silicon-valley-is-filled-with-liars/

Once you sign up, they tell you about the "15% feee", that is not public in the website.

It's public here:

http://developerauction.com/for_employers

I didn't get the price. Care to explain? 100 tasks free, and then?

Sure thing.

While the service is in beta, anyone can try a maximum of 100 tasks for free for any of the products built on MobileWorks: form digitization, web scraping, or tasks that new app developers build on the API. The idea is to get developers started working with crowd as easily as possible.

We'll announce the formal pricing for form digitization and scraping products soon.

For community-built applications, prices are set depending on the complexity of the task and how long it takes workers to do them. We time the first few workers to do a task to see how long it takes, then return a price based on that.

"While the service is in beta, anyone can try a maximum of 100 tasks for free for any of the products built on MobileWorks: form digitization, web scraping, or tasks that new app developers build on the API. The idea is to get developers started working with crowd as easily as possible."

Wait, I don't understand. If I build an application on the API am I limited to 100 hours for now? If so, that severely disincentivizes me to build on the platform.

"For community-built applications, prices are set depending on the complexity of the task and how long it takes workers to do them."

And that price is WHAT during the beta period? I would really like to build an application. If I make an application and sell it to other people, what is the price? Am I limited to 100 jobs?

Congratulations, Anand! Didn't know you were in this yc batch.

Thanks! Looking forward to having the research community start using our crowd and giving us their thoughts.

Bonuses: no task starvation, no spammers, a usable API, and highly motivated workers.

Let me also add that you probably know my co-founders Prayag, Philipp, and Dave from their days at Cal. MobileWorks spun out of Berkeley's Department of CS and School of Information, and was built in response to the pain we all felt as they struggled to get good results out of crowds.

I used to use FS but now I use Stripe and I save 50% or more in fees. Your fees are very high.

You obviously have to use what best suits you, but don't forget that with less expensive-appearing services you typically have to pay 3.5-4% in processing fees, but they end up costing you far more when you factor in software development costs, merchant fees, and especially the amount of time you will spend if using an existing basic service that appears to cost less.

You also have to factor in chargeback fees, processing for non-qualified transactions (i.e. corporate cards, rewards cards, int'l cards, Amex cards, all of which cost far more than the often quoted 2-2.5% "qualified" transactions.

Thanks.

I used to use Fastspring but your prices are simply too high. With Stripe I save more that half in fees.

The costs of advertising a service like "Hipmunk for X" are tremendous.

True. Sign up for yCombinator :)