ScriptLance

» see scriptlance.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

René Trescases incorporated a company called R3N3 International Inc. in Canada in 2001, at the age of twenty. What it ran was ScriptLance: you posted a programming job and coders bid against each other to do it, with the lowest workable bid taking the work. The strapline under the logo read "Connecting business with programmers", and that really was the whole product description.

Reverse auction boards were one of the few routes by which somebody writing code outside the United States or Western Europe could be paid in dollars, and anyone doing that kind of work in Turkey around 2005 knew the category existed. I never posted a bid on one. The arithmetic put me off before I got as far as making an account, and it was the only part of the pitch that nobody had dressed up.

Here is that arithmetic. At the point of sale ScriptLance had processed around 600,000 projects and paid out about $43 million to the people who did them. Divide one by the other and the average job on the site, across eleven years, was worth roughly seventy-two dollars.

It was not small. 360,000 registered users in 244 countries, regions and territories made it the largest freelance marketplace in Canada and the fifth largest anywhere. Trescases had also written a crowdfunding feature into the site himself, which the company liked to describe as one of the world's first.

On 9 July 2012 Freelancer.com announced that it had bought the company, pushing its own membership past four million and giving it a Canadian entity to launch Freelancer.ca from. The price was never disclosed. Trescases left. The remaining staff, including half a dozen people in India, moved over.

~ the dossier ~

~ the redirect ~

The last date on which replay shows a working ScriptLance front page is 5 July 2012, four days before the announcement. By 31 July the same address answered 301 Moved Permanently, and the Location header sent you to freelancer.com/campaign/0MGL0101, a marketing landing page with the fragment #sl stuck on the end so the traffic could be counted.

That redirect held through a couple of different targets into late 2013, and by October 2017 the archive was recording the address returning an empty 301 with nothing behind it. The domain has no DNS record today. There is no farewell page anywhere in replay. No capture shows the site telling its own users anything about the sale.

~ what the number means ~

Seventy-two dollars a job is the sentence that explains the decade. For a buyer in a wealthy country that was a working script for about the price of dinner, and for a seller somewhere cheaper it could be a serious week. The gap between those two readings is the only thing the marketplace ever sold, and when Freelancer paid for ScriptLance it was buying the gap rather than the website.

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