Hire this firm at your own peril. If you are thinking about working with them, email me and I will share my experience - this is singularly the worst experience we have ever had with a vendor - they are not a reputable firm and we are commencing legal action against them.
We retained BlueLuna on February 17, 2012, over one year ago to build an integrated website that includes a new online learning management system, a front end website, and and ecommerce system to replace our existing integrated site. They were very competitive and were also really easy to work with. Blue Luna made a proposal which we accepted that estimating the project to take 9 weeks, payments in 4 installments - $8,750 upon acceptance, $6,125 on week 3, $7,350 in week 7, and the final payment upon website launch on week 9 of $2,450. Blue Luna requested payments according to the schedule and we made the first three payments per the agreement by week 7, totaling $22,050.
There hasn't been a meaningful update in over a year since when the project began, and the current project is in a state of disarray. Last month, Michael Austin, our primary contact there told me that they are unable to complete the project. When we requested a refund for the $22,050 in fees that we paid BlueLuna for services that they did not provide, Michael refused the full refund and has yet to even offer a partial refund. After an extremely frustrating year trying to work with BlueLuna we will need to hire a new company to take on the project, and we had marketing and sales initiatives lined up last year that we had to cancel as a result.
Some more background: The project was mismanaged by BlueLuna in almost every respect. From the beginning, we would not receive status updates for weeks at a time and when we were finally able to track them down it was only after multiple attempts to reach them over the phone and via email. When we did get a hold of them, there would be no meaningful updates - it would usually be along the lines of "we understand you are frustrated, let's schedule a time next week once we get a handle on this" and then the process of trying to get a hold of them the next week would begin again. For a very long time, we were extremely - overly - patient with them. We just wanted the project done but there was no one on the other side seriously engaging with us. I am attaching an email I sent to our primary contact at BlueLuna, Michael Austin- one of over 100 emails to him and to our other contact try to get status updates over the last yea:
From me, February 27, 2013:
"I am going to get back to Jennie but I wanted to express my disappointment about our experience working with blueLuna. I think we have been incredibly patient throughout this process, with the slow development process, the turnover, the missed phone calls, deadlines, etc. but in the last month it has gotten completely unacceptable. I have emailed you and called you multiple times to try to understand what the status is of our project and I haven't gotten a response. It is one of the most unprofessional situations I have encountered in my career. I need to have a conversation with you about this please let me know your availability this week."
A response from Michael, over a week later:
"I fully understand, I can talk mostly any time this week. Please let me know what works best for you and I will try and align."
That has been the typical back and forth "I fully understand" followed by BlueLuna telling us some action will take place, and nothing happens. The company has ignored this project so blatantly that they didn't even know where their own latest development files were - we had to point out where their files were housed. read more
