TECHXPRESS.NET RIPOFF NO FTP ACCESS to site Company scamming people with large fees and not completing work for me San Luis Obispo California

I just want to express after years of this dispute that I would like to forget my ripoff report on Techxpress. While I had problems with them and yes there were others, businesses sometimes change and learn from their mistakes. Doesn't mean they have but I willing to let this matter go and just say I am sorry for making this report. If I could remove it I would but ripoffreport doesn't allow authors to edit or remove their reports.

I want to wish them well and hope they continue to good things with their company.

Agreed! TechXpress (tech express, techexpress, tech xpress) Website Design and Web Development in San Luis Obispo CA is a total rip-off.

While their websites do look nice, you have to understand the back-dealings.

Clients do not really own their website. Outrageous costs, high monthly support fees, and if you want to move to another company someday, you do not get to keep/move your website, since it's built on their proprietary systems (which is nothing special BTW; open-source CMS have them beat badly). You essentially spend tens of thousands of dollars and don't own a thing. A way to keep you locked in after you find our how bad the service and owner is.

Also, employees have a revolving door. One day your working with someone, and then it's a whole new guy, never to hear again from the other. They must fire their smart labourers and keep the cheap ones (or the smart ones just leave). I personally known a few ex-employees now. Neither of them have one thing positive to say.

There a tons of great website design firms out there today, and TechXpress website design / development is not one of them.

As for the owner, Bryan Sarlitt, he in general has a bad name in town due to his ethics. He must have some media contacts which he uses to leverage for his benefit with bogus awards and press, and yes, pays the BBB for his ratings. You simply can't trust the BBB; They represent thier paying customers like TechXpress, not the public.

This is why forums like this do represent the public. It's easy and fast. I can post my complaint and be done. I want to waste no further time with TechXpress or Bryan Sarlitt beyond writing this post, so why the hassle of BBB. It's just not worth the effort.

You have been warned. Shop around, and leverage complaint boards. They can save you time,$$, and worry. I wish I had.

I worked at Techxpress several years ago.  It was maybe the worst work experiences of my life.  Just to give everyone an idea of Bryan's business ethics, the company collected old computers for charity.  They called it "computers for kids" or something like that. What happened with these machines?  Well maybe some were actually given away to kids, but there was store room at techxpress where this stuff was stored and it was constantly raided to provide equipment for developers and staff.  This was real fraud dealing with a kids charity, just to save a few dollars.  It was disgusting.  I mean come on Bryan, collecting stuff for kids then using it to try to make more of a profit. you should be ashamed of yourself.

As for all the awards? People need to realize that there are very few independent business in San Louis Obispo.  Most things are tourist related, like restaurants, bars or related to the university. So yeah who knows why they give these awards, but trust me, it is not the customers that vote for these awards.

The other points are more or less true.  The CMS was a joke it was designed by a rotating cast of people that seemed to have just graduated from high school.  The business model here was to lock customers into a proprietary system lock them out of FTP access.  The other profit center was of course labor arbitrage they pay low skilled people $9, $10, $11 hour and then bill the customer $100 per hour.  Is this customers being ripped-off, or is this just capitalism?  Well you make up your own mind on that one.

This company was horrible. They contacted me with an offer to build a standard website for. The sales rep assured me that I would be getting a "beautiful, custom, website just for your trade" And after lookinig on their website it sure enough says the same claim on the front page, just like this other person quoted in their review. Well that didn't happen because after they sent me a proof I did some researching and found out that mine was an exact copy of another one they did for another company here in my area. I asked them to redo it, they said it would cost more money. I contacted them to get a full refund and that was when I was talking to the supposed manager /owner. I have never been so mistreaded by someone before in my life. He was swearing, name calling, harrassing, and belittling me and my company, and told me that I would get no where and they would never refund the money. Customer service and fixing problems is obviously their lowest priority. I wish I would have seen the other rating on here from the 'star' person before I signed up. They were horrible and I would never ever ever wish them on anyone again. That guy wouldn't give me any more contact information either and said that he was the only one that I would ever speak with. Save your time and money people. Contact real professionals.

Dear readers,

I am the owner/CEO of TechXpress, and once again, we do not show a record of a "Jeff Anderson" from San Luis Obispo doing business with us as the complaint alleges. I'd welcome any proof of such a claim (e.g. name of business, website, etc). In the mean time, I am not going to waste my time rebuttling each of "Jeff's" erroneous points. Obviously, if what Jeff was saying were true, we wouldn't be in business for very long.

The facts are that TechXpress has been in business for 10 years, has received tremendous community recognition/awards, maintains a sterling AAA rating with the Better Business Bureau, and has a slew of very happy customers. Take a look at some of them for yourself: http://www.techxpress.net/testimonials.php

With all of the success also comes challenges, which at times can be in dealing with and resolving (legitimate) customer complaints. I'm not going to allege that I or my company is perfect. I don't think any business owner can claim that. However, I DO make it a point to give my attention to, and make every effort to fairly resolve any issue that comes my way. In most all cases, this has resulted in favorable outcomes.

I welcome anyone with concerns to contact me directly.

Sincerely,

Bryan Sarlitt
Founder / CEO
TechXpress
805-541-4400 ext. 201
bsarlitt@techxpress.net

Here's some comments what people have to say about Techxpress.

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My experience was very similar to yours. After 11 months of stress, repeated meetings, and false promises, I finally pulled the plug and took a big financial loss. I will definitely follow through with a formal complaint.

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We did not have a good experience with them. We have actually switched to another company too.

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We have given up on TechXPress and are in the process of porting to another app. It's too bad, but it seems they had severe intra communication problems from the first day we started business with them.

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I have had all the same issues that you mention, which is why I too have switched to another online web host. It angers me that for the money spent each month, I have no access to MY OWN site.
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We have had issues too and gave up on them.

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We have not been happy either.

__________________
In the beginning I did have some problems with them. Sometimes
not able to get on my admin site or my stat site. I called and it is fixed. I did have some work done that took a long time and it was finally fixed and I got a refund for the delay. I also had some problems with my order page that needed to be more user friendly. I have had the site for approx three years and these problems were at the beginning. I have not needed them for anything else except web hosting. Plan to make some changes to the site in the near future so I will see how that goes with someone else.

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I am happy with them on the most part. Things are more expensive now though.

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We are slowly switching to another company. We found someone who specializes in restaurants and who does it for far less. TechXpress is too expensive, too unresponsive.

We originally signed up with Somnioworld and the original owners were not at all like at Techxpress. They decided it was better to move on and sold out to Brian. We knew a long time ago that they would not do any updates to the Somnioworld software and that they would try to switch us to theirs. Their (24 hour) service is bullshit and they tried to charge us way too much money to convert our site to their preferred software. All I can say is that their arrogance will some day come back to bite them.

With so much time invested in the sight it's tough to take it somewhere else overnight so we are in the process of building what we call our backup site and learning how to use all the stuff provided by another provider. It's a lot of work, but in the end we'll total control over the site and it will be hosted by a much more reliable company and one the update software, has 24 hour support, etc, etc, etc.

I think you have made a wise decision to be in total control and if you can learn the in's and out of building and managing your own site you will save yourself literally tens of thousands of $$$.
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Thoroughly disgusted with Techxpress.

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Techxpress has been a little slow in returning calls, and sometimes forgetting what I call about. They change hands freq in their web department. But the last few times I had problems with my site, as long as I kept up with them, they were quite helpful in resolving issues. Price wise, I hear about lower prices from other people wanting to host my site. I don't know if it's a selling point for them or if they can actually do the job cheaper. Once you're with techxpress though, they have proprietary rights to the software of your site, meaning if you spend $3000 on a site you can't just take it to another host, they own it. So beware. Make sure it's what you want before signing papers.

These comments about Techxpress are true as we have experienced all of this also. They charged us $100 an hour, gave us a deadline and little or not much done. If I could ask for my money back and start over, I would go this route in a second.

I think posting this company is an excellent discussion. Hosting for us was also very expensive with Techxpress and true, they don't give yus "ftp' access either, we weren't given a clear picture about what access we were going to get as we wanted to program our own functions too. Techxpress's owner would not allow us php access to our site and told us we had an access to an editor calling it a "content manager system".

We agree as this is really only a note pad option for just content, links and pics. Anything we wanted changed, required a lot of money and worrying how long it will take get it done as they would not respond on time.

On our site, we wrote to the owner by simply terminating Techxpress for many reasons. They did not give us our money back but begged us to stay with them.

I think Techxpress has too much work on their hands and we felt last on their to do list to help us build our site. We lost too much time and money as we should of researched a hoster with more access options.

Steve

Sorry on the dates, yes it is September 8th today. This is a copied & paste option info from a complaint page. I just wanted to get my word out to people so people know how Techxpress.net screwed us over. We just want to let people know so they don't make the mistake we did.



The time line on this was: hired them Jan. 25, 2005



Techxpress said 6 weeks to complete the project.



Based design to be completed by March 4, 2005. - didn't finish!



Then came Apirl, then came May, June, July, August, September



and oh now, Christmas time, not a darn thing.



They played with us and take a look at their clients on their web portfolio page techxpress.net/website_solutions.php, e-mail all their clients, check them out, ask how they like their services, see the answers their customers say about Techxpress.



Don't use this company, at $100.00an hour, you don't get $100.00 hour worth of service, you get computer greeks who sit all day drinking Pepsi and playing video games (that's how they build web sites). Their sites are cheap web templates, they have a list of these so called web templates as if they make you think they are going to build you something but hey, look at that secret template list, lots of hard work, wrong.



On top of this, their hostering services rates are another rip-off. They have crap servers and no FTP folks even if you pay them top dollar.



There is over 10 million web developers in the United States, anybody can do this work for 1/4 their price and you'll get full FTP access. You can hire any developer or student web programmer, find a hosting site and first question, ask for FTP access. You pay the hoster $10.00 a month, get your FTP access and find yourself a student programmer. You and your programmer can work one on one, build the site of your dreams folks.



Do waste your money from people like at Techxpress.net, get a good cheap hoster, good companies like ((( competators names redacted by ROR))) or something like these companies. There are all sorts of cheap prices, you want full FTP and PHP editors.



sorry, allowing you to give a competitors name would instigate others to just file against their competition, to only come back later to suggest their company your comments on this policy are welcome! CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report. In this case we removed an alleged competitors name



Look for a programmer and seek a web programmer with FTP, PHP access with Dreamweaver experience. There are others but this is all you need.



Students programmers range from $15.00 to $30.00 an hour, best thing we did.



An hey with that extra money you save not hiring Techxpress you can donate some extra money to some good charities and feel better about yourself helping people like we did.

Is this an old report or new? You said it is now Feb. 2006, but the report says it was started today (Sept. 8)



The rest of your report is kind of confusion on the timeline also. Just wondering thanks.