Carbonon Tech

How Carbonon Tech stole $4,000 from me...

In May of 2006 I hired Carbonon Tech through Guru.com to code a website I had designed. They had quoted me a price of $3,500 and said it would be completed in 3-4 months.

11 Months later I have no website and am out $4,000. This is my story about how Carbonon Tech stole $4,000 from me.

Help me out

If you wish to help me out, please make a post on your blog if you have one or at a developer/design forum you visit.

Please link back to this site using the text "Carbonon" or "Carbonon Tech" and link to http://www.carbonon-scammers.com

My goal is for this site to appear in the #1 spot for their company name and to warn as many people as I can about their horrible service. Thank you.

The Contract

Original Cost Estimate: $3472
Estimate time to completion: 4 months

Site was to be a community much like Myspace. Users signup for an account, they get a small blog, can communicate with other members, ect. There was more to it than that. I still plan on going through with this site, hiring someone else to make it, so I don't want to give out my idea. Although I'm sure you can guess the basics.

Added Costs

Along the way I had added some features which added to the cost. I have no problem with that. But what I wasn't expecting was to be nickle and dimed the whole way on some of the most rediculas features that should have been 100% included.

Having the site work in Firefox: + $320

Can't tell you how suprised I was with this added cost. I could understand if it was Opera or Safari, but Firefox holds a 15% market share of all the browsers and is the 2nd most used browser. That should be standard.

Thumb images being acutal thumbs: + $150

When someone uploads a large image to the system it was to automatically create a thumbnail for that image so the user can browse through their pics quickly. There system did NOT create an acutal thumbnail , instead it resized the original image. So if a user uploaded 10 pics that were 200 KB each, the thumbs would also be 200 KB each, making the page load extremely slow. Absolutely blew my mind that they wanted to charge me to make actual thumbsnails. Unbelievable. I refused to pay for this. I thought this was 2007 not 1992.

Instant Message System:

This was supposed to be a feature where one users could instantly IM another user through popup windows much like AIM. What they did was install a 3rd party chat script. A CHAT SCRIPT. Both users would have to log into a chat room to talk along with anyone else who was in their. After a dozen emails they still could not understand the difference and so I told them to remove this feature because they were incompetent. They did not lower the price even though they failed on one of the major features of the site.

User Blog:

Once a user registers they would get a blog much like Myspace where they can post, add friends, ect. They installed yet again another 3rd party blog script, which was not even skined to match the site. Again I complained and they said I didn't say it had to match in the contract. WOW, why not just make every page look completely different and charge me to skin each page. I was charged to make them skin the blog, which they never did.

Language Barrier

This is a company from India. Even though they spoke and wrote english well, they could not understand it. It would take 4-5 emails some times to explain to them what I meant. In one instance I had used a different word for a feature that was in our contract. They replied saying it would cost an extra $400. It took about a week to finally explain to them that its the same feature that was already in the contract and I just had used a different word for it.

NO Quality Assurance Testing

They did absolutely NO QA TESTING before sending me updates on the site. I should have fired them after the first update they sent me.

- I went to the site, tried using the search user feature and it didn't work. Literlly took me 10 seconds to find a major feature not working. They replied saying it was fixed 2 days later, but it wasn't. Two weeks and about 5-6 emails saying it was fixed each time before they had actually got it working.

- After each update it would take me 3-5 hrs to test the site and document all the bugs and features not working. I would have to stop testing sometimes because there were so many bugs that I would just be wasting my time. I would create bug reports pages long, they would reply a week later saying everything was fixed. When I retested, only about 1/3 of the items would be fixed. Horrible.

11 Months Later

What should have been a 4 month project has been going on for 11 months now. I have paid them 80% of the total final cost, yet the site isn't even 50% done.

Carbonon has stolen $4,000 from me and left me with a worthless site and 3rd party scripts installed everywhere. Since they are in India it would be costly to pursue legal action against them, so I have created this site instead.

I would recommend anyone who is looking to hire someone to create a website for you, to stay away from Carbonon Tech. At best you will get a horribly coded site, at worst you will get a large bill and no site at all.

Sabatoge

The day after I demanded a refund and before I had changed the password to the site Carbonon edited something in the database which now produces an access denied message to the MySQL database. I guessing they did this so that no one could see the terrible site they created. See for yourself at

http://www.gameonn.com

Im don't really know MySQL to well otherwise I would try to fix it so you can see the horrible site that was created by Carbonon Tech.

If you know how to fix this please let me know at mikez006@hotmail.com. This is a secondary email address, which I only check once a week, so if I don't reply right away it doesn't mean I didn't get it.