Ask HN: How do you find an expert?

As for how much to pay, it would depend on the problem and the buyer. In my case, since my need is semi-hobby, I would pay $200 or less for someone who could answer my question. The challenge is finding someone who actually knows the problem and scenario. For that magical person, they can probably spend 15 minutes and earn $200. Someone who doesn't immediately recognize the problem will spend more time, and then it will obviously be worth less to them.

So the challenge is in identifying the need and providing the matchmaking. Especially for the HN crowd, we are likely to have exhausted the obvious web search solutions already; so we need someone who really knows the narrow domain. Like in my case, I know there are probably 20-100 people in the world who have setup a pihole with cloudflared succesfully. The trick is finding them :).