Amusing story: One time, I was chatting with someone I met on HN who was trying to learn three.js. He wanted to potentially hire me as a freelancer to help him with the graphics side of a little game he was working on. He explained what he wanted done, and at the end of it I was left feeling like "This is so easy it would be wrong of me to exploit this guy like this." I didn't phrase it quite like that, but I said something along the lines of "Okay, so at this point, most people would take your money and do the project. But I feel like I should do you a favor and not do that, because this is actually not a hard problem. Here's some tutorials that are pretty much exactly what you're asking: x, y, z"
Next thing I see, he's disconnected from chat and never said another word to me.
The lesson for me (besides that I'm an idiot for not taking the money) is that the amount of value you think you're providing is almost always wildly different from the actual value you're providing. Even if it's just "take money, follow tutorial."
This has happened to me in the past when I was wearing my project manager hat. From my perspective it felt like I was negotiating with extremely apathetic individuals (not saying you are like that; this was just my experience with these people). I would make a request and the response was usually something like, "that is so simple...here are the instructions." It would have been a huge pain to convince the other parties that the business purpose of my inquiry was on solid ground. I would have to explain that I was trying to tie up a minuscule patch in a larger gantt chart, the nature of project management, the way I was looking to build long-term relationships (usually completely under-appreciated), etc.
In one case I offered to pay a premium to a developer for his domain expertise, only for him to loop around and use our project discussions as an evangelism platform for his software of choice. Almost every one of his replies started with "No problem," had the software name in the middle, and ended with "makes this extremely simple." At the end of the project he gave me a gigantic discount because I was now "part of the community." Needless to say, I found the didactic nature of his communications extremely difficult and we never worked together after that.
Back in development mode (as opposed to project management mode) I can understand what was happening. I've landed new clients because they noticed my community contributions and saw that I was geographically close to them. And whenever someone says, "we just don't have time to do this ourselves" I can now offer 100% of my empathy. Still, I'm surrounded by community members who type up massive tutorials within an hour, or build a completed demo project that does 80% of what the requester needs, and then disappear when the requester asks for just a bit more, or heaven forbid, offers money.
Next thing I see, he's disconnected from chat and never said another word to me.
The lesson for me (besides that I'm an idiot for not taking the money) is that the amount of value you think you're providing is almost always wildly different from the actual value you're providing. Even if it's just "take money, follow tutorial."