Complaint Review: 12AM Agency - Dallas Texas

In May 2017 I decided that my e-commerce website was outdated and needed a facelift and new code.  In June I signed a contract with 12AM agency stating that I would pay $20,000 for my website to be redesigned with new code with an estimated completion time of 6-8 weeks.  Robert Portillo is the owner of 12AM agency and put 2 brothers, Ravi and Manohar, in charge of the project.  Payment would be made when each milestone was met. 

The project went as planned other than the time frame.  12 weeks later, I still had no website and the project had grinded to a complete halt.  Robert had assured me that his company was entirely based in the US and all coding would be done in the US but this was a lie.  The entire project was outsourced to India.  Upon the project being 90% complete and almost ready to launch the company approached me stating that they needed more money to finish the project as it was a bigger project than they had anticipated.  Our contract clearly stated $20,000 for a completed website with the same functions as the old site.  I refused to pay more than what was stated in the contract and that's when everything went downhill. 

Weeks went by with no updates as they had moved on to other projects.  After much back and forth I finally agreed to launch the 90% completed site with a promise that the other 10% would be finished over the weekend.  In order for them to launch the new site I would have to release the final milestone payment ($8000).  The new site they launched was a complete hack job.  It had no mobile functionality, pages were not aligned, products could not be added or removed correctly, there was no tracking code or google analytics, and to be qutie frank, the site simply did not work. 

Rather than fix this, they started trying to sell me updates to the site even though the original contract was not completed.  I finally had enough of Ravi and Manohar and I contacted Robert to get the situation resolved.  He simply stated that the project was completed when I released the final funds and that it was tough luck.  Furthermore, I was not given any of the source code for the site and when I mentioned that his employees were trying to skate my business by having me pay them directly, both Ravi and Manohar completely quit the project (or were fired).

  At this point I was stuck with no source code, a broken e-commerce site, and was losing money daily.  It took 2 weeks to finally convince Robert to give me my source code so that I could fix my site so that business could be conducted on it again.  This website is 100% of my income so I finally had to agree not to press any further charges, waive my 2 weeks of service I was supposed to receive in the original contract.  None of the bugs, alignment issues, broken pages etc were fixed.  When I finally received my source code and hired an in-house developer, it took amost $12,000 worth of labor to fix their project.  

To summarize, 12AM agency is a complete scam.  They promise you work, outsource it, do a hack job, then threaten you until you have no choice but to accept their incomplete project.  Robert Portillo is a thief and a scam artist.  I did not file charges as growing my business takes a higher priority than pursuing damages that are less than a quarter of a percent of our revenue but hopefully this report keeps anyone else from making the same mistake as me.