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DiggBidmycleaning.com is known as the “eBay of house cleaning services”. The company’s website allows homeowners to receive multiple competitive bids for house cleaning, window and carpet cleaning services, schedule appointments, and pay for their service online without talking to a single service provider.
And while Bidmycleaning.com offers a practical solution for anyone looking for a little extra help around the house, their business model is equally useful in showing small business owners how to keep tech costs low and maximize profits.
BidMyCleaning.com launched in April 2008 with virtually no budget for software and technology costs. These constraints prompted Bidmycleaning.com’s CEO, Raymond Akers, to utilize free and low cost products such as Open Source and Freeware to bootstrap their web startup.
If you are unfamiliar with these products, Open Source is a community of programmers that develop and improve upon existing source code and offer their work to the public free of charge for general use or modification. On the other hand, Freeware is open to the public, but licensing rules restrict how the company uses or modifies that software.
And while “free” in the tech industry is sometimes a dirty word in terms of quality, Akers is extremely happy with his decision to use free and low cost products. He offered the following advice to those toying around with the same idea:
“It goes without saying that the first benefit of Open Source is that it is free. In this case however, free does not mean that it is a pared down or inferior solution to a product you would pay handsomely for. Today’s Open Source software products are in most cases as good as, or sometimes even better than the expensive alternatives.
Another benefit is that the Open Source community is a lot like the Social Media community, in that it is very cohesive with lots of people willing to engage with you and provide really great support and guidance. There is ready information-sharing and many devout (or fanatical) followers who generate a large, well organized knowledge base which is accessible to you for free with a Google search. Free code libraries, extensions, components, platforms and/or addons are readily available. Your largest cost is likely to be your development talent, and so their ability to save time by using canned code where it makes sense will be invaluable.
Development tools are another area where you can save by using the Eclipse or NetBeans IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) together with the powerful debugging features of the FireFox Web Browser with the freely available Web Developer Addons.
Finally, when looking for free solutions don’t forget Freeware - it may not be Open Source but it can be useful for filling some gaps in your technology plan.”
This business plan proved extremely successful for the executives at Bidmycleaning.com, as their savings allowed them to shift their focus to marketing in an effort to increase awareness and bring in customers. The small startup out of Houston is growing rapidly and is now active in cities throughout Texas and California including Dallas, Fort Worth, San Diego, Orange Country, Los Angeles, as well as Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.
However, if you’re still skeptical regarding the power of free software, the owners of Bidmycleaning.com invite you to check out their platform to see for yourself just how functional a “low cost” site can be.
Oh, and while you’re there, use coupon code SPARKAT to save $10 off of your next house, carpet or window cleaning courtesy of Mr. Akers.
Lynette enjoys discovering new ways to use technology or new technologies to use in a business and in turn help her clients apply them.
You can find also Lynette at her 
Fantastic real-world case study of the power of open source and free technology. I know that there is a lot of skepticism, the whole “you get what you pay for” thing.
But really, Open Source is just the result of people realizing that there’s no need to make people pay to re-invent the wheel over and over again.
KatFrench
Because use of open source is so widespread among startups, Microsoft realized they were missing opportunities and recently launched the BizSpark program. Essentially a startup gets access to all their software for free! You may be thinking there is no such thing as a free lunch and you’d be right. For them it is an opportunity to lock companies in when they are getting started with the proviso that they will pay from the software in three years. In the interim the only requirement is helping them with PR by providing feedback and ’soundbytes’. We used Vista immediately and are investigating whether a switch to SQL with ASP.net makes sense for us.