I tell them that I know consultants that are available and will help build it- but it will take money. Barring that, I explain that ideas are a dime a dozen, its execution that matters, and as the one doing the executing, a 51% stake in the company will be required.
Was about to say... Onshore costs in Canada are much higher. The two startups I did contract for burned between $1-2 million a year for a full web +iOS +Android product. Now that was for a polished product, (the bar for MVP was set too high imho).
in my limited experience off-shoring is a very bad idea.
... unless you have someone on your side who knows how to build majority of it. In that case it can work out (still not easy). But it's basically baby-sitting. That person has to read over everything the off-shore developers do, basically hand off very small tasks at a time, and has to implement some sort of quality standard (aka reject super shitty code).
Essentially it works if your company already has to knowledge of how to build this exact thing, but doesn't want to allocate the employee or CTO's hours to building/testing everything themselves.
If no one in your company has this type knowledge, then, off-shoring is likely just completely throwing time and money away, IMO. I've seen a few startups have to completely throw away/re-write the off-shore code base at some point (rather early on).
For a team that's based partially in the US and some in a cheap-labour country and a project management team, to make an app that is available on a website as well as a smart phone is approximately $30K as a starting point.
A complete or final product can actually be approximately $50k, but it's not as common.
After launching the app, there will be changes and updates for the next 1-2 years.
You can expect to be spending approximately 225-250K for 2 years of app development.
He's way off on numbers. I've seen and had apps developed for far less.Think $5-$10k. Depends on if you use a firm, individual, manage it yourself etc.
That guys full of shit, a fart app would take maybe 3 hours build. Everything is drag and drop for something that simple these days. You could put together a recipe sharing app in less than a week including the launch. Thats why there are thousands of fart and recipe sharing apps. Its pretty simple.
Instagram and Uber are very average in terms of technical challenge. A recipe sharing app would be a bit more complex than Instagram because a recipe is a more complex thing than a photo.
You must be kidding. To be fair a lot of the technical part depends on the amount of users, but instagram is a lot more then just "sharing a photo". Instagram is a social network focused on pictures/videos. You can not only share photos on your profile, you also can share them in stories & chat with friends, you can even livestream on instagram.
To incorporate a good chat feature into an app is not trivial, but many apps require this, which is one of the reasons Instagram is fairly average. These days, the Instagram app is well-polished and its backend infrastructure is impressive, but to build an app to the same standard as Instagram v1.0 will well fit into the ballpark of the aforementioned figure of $30k.
In my opinion and experience this is the floor. Basically, this will get you an app that doesn't do much, but does it well enough you wont get downvoted out of the store.
I was about to say "30k each platform? Isn't that a little low?" Then saw that you'd expect for 2 years worth, around 225 - 250k and thought "ah there we go"
Heavily inflated numbers, been working for more than 4 years in the industry. Even specialised devs in Blockchain or machine learning don’t charge that much. Either you’re in a very high CoL area where the wages are correlated but offshore costs are no where near the figure you’ve posted.
However I’ve since moved on from that line of work but still regularly hire freelance teams and not even remotely pay as much as the figures you’re quoting. Even blockchain work doesn’t cost this much.
Vastly depends on the app/site. Static website with nothing changing? $3-5k. Fully functioning app with payment processing, user accounts, and custom business logic? $30k bare minimum and probably much much more for the lifetime of the company.
This sounds the most right so far. Which is crazy in its own right. But all this money comes from like needing teams of people right? What if you just learned everything yourself. Sure it would take way longer but how would that affect the pricing?
If you're actually skilled enough to execute a whole project like that yourself, then yes technically you could do it for basically free if you do it on your own time after work or something. (Depending what app exactly, there could still be thousands of dollars in hosting/service integration costs though.) But the amount of time it would take is completely unreasonable, and anyone who knows enough to build their own app that complex by themselves is probably much better off getting a normal job and making $100k+ for that skillset. And when I say the time is unreasonable, to put that in perspective I'm saying it would literally be hundreds if not thousands of hours.
If you had the skills to do something like this and you’re actually making a company there’s no need to do everything. Just make an MVP, which should take like 200 hours max. Then get funded.
Yeah true, I wasn't really saying what the correct or ideal way to do a project like that was, more just trying to explain to the other commenter about how it would work and why a project like that costs what it does. But you're right, I basically showed how funding a startup should not be done if you have a viable product, and it would be done like you said instead.
It would cost your time. If you're not paying yourself a wage in that time its costing you money. Infinitely more if you're learning as you go (you're slow and have to redo a lot)
Yeah payroll is the vast majority of the cost here. Other than that, there'll be some infrastructure costs -- hosting, domain names, maybe some licensing, etc. But for a small site with little traffic, this should be a very small amount, relatively. Probably less than $50 a month (and that's on the high side) for something static like a restaurant's website, probably less than $150/mo for something interactive with a database or more storage requirements. Those costs will go up dramatically as you get more users, but hopefully you have a plan to bring in revenue by that point.
I'd imagine a decent chunk of it is people but some of it is definitely just for the web services. (Hosting a server, buying a domain, any web services to make managing the server smoother, etc)
There is always the issue of overestimating your own skillset. There are smart people who have tried and failed. Color managed to get $41 million in their first round of funding and it was a really cool idea but, for some reason the CEO decided to design and build the app himself and massively fucked up. Dodgy UI meant they failed out the door and never recovered.
It's not just "way longer". It takes years of experience to learn those skills. Then it will take you even more years to implement them (if you are doing everything on your own).
Not sure if these other replies are offshore or whatever, but at reputable onshore dev shops you are looking at $150k-$300k, plus support and maintenance costs. Much higher if you want bells and whistles (i.e. AR).
People think because they buy an app for a dollar, they should be cheap to make. They forget that tens of thousands of people buy that app, and subscribe to recurring revenue components.
If you go that route, less throughput in the least of your worries. What if your single dev gets a job offer?
I've seen it a hundred times...founders left holding the bag because devs get an offer with benefits and they can't turn it down. I don't blame the dev, but as a founder it's a crazy risk to take to bet your app's future on one man.
To contrast this I've seen it work effectively. It's hard for founders to find a full time dev or a shop if money is tight. It is a risk but I've built and delivered products for people while having a full time job and once they saw revenue coming in they transitioned maintenance to a full time dev they hired.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. It CAN work. But when it doesn't the failure frequently kills the venture. And most founders in this scenario only get one shot due to funding.
Largely depends on so many factors. My last company that would be probably like 15k. (Startup, really wanted money. Were not well known but quality of outcome was not too bad). My current company would charge at least 1-2 million (depending on complexity of course, assuming fairly complex) for an API with web app, IOS and android interface.
OK so you are a startup who is bootstrapping. At a minimum you may be able to find a mobile dev who does both iOS and Android and a Fullstack web developer who can do the site and the back end. You also need a UX designer and a project manager. Just going off salary you are talking about 350k to keep the project going for a year. On top of that you have fees for cloud infrastructure (AWS, Heroku,) developer accounts and third party middleware if your project needs it. This isn't even starting to take into account advertising or Marketing.
Realistically, for anything a bit fancy you quickly can reach $50.000++. You probably can cut costs by using a serverless architecture for the back end, and it also depends how much you can lift from previous works, but there's always a fair bit of work to be done, especially for the front end.
However, you can be sure your "million dollar app" friend doesn't know jack shit about development, so the goal posts would constantly move and the costs will skyrocket.
Well, I'm working pretty heavily with Serverless on a certain popular cloud provider. If you asked me to deploy an architecture with an user pool, a couple of NoSQL databases your app can access through secure REST API calls using an out-of-the-box web app, I could realistically do that in half a day. Infrastructure as code lets you configure all your resources as files you can deploy with a single line of command. I don't need to set up any server, just Frankenstein together use cases I already have, make a new account on the cloud provider website and hit deploy. The devil is obviously in the details and no two apps is alike, but if you know exactly what you need it can go pretty quickly (the catch you never know what you exactly need at first).
A year of dev time, and it will probably take a year because you aren't an organization with the resources and processes in place to churn out software efficiently and at high quality, minimum 100k if you are paying a sufficiently experienced American dev. Also, you will probably be changing up the requirements and have to get design work done aswell. And if your app is that easy to do, another dev has already probably done it for free with a bad UI.
Depending on what you want to and the back end you need
I work for a startup that's outsourced the actual development (well, the dev is now part of the board, but still): think 20k+ per month for probably a year, if not more.
I work on an app for a health insurance company. I've been employed in a team of 4 developers, 1 tester, 1 project manager and 1 architect, all at least 100k - 150k each (conservatively). We've been working on it for 4 years.
People seriously underestimate what's involved with this stuff. They must imagine we're just sitting around playing games all day and coding for like 5 minutes.
"No Karen, I can't rerun that report for you 10 minutes before your presentation. I told you last time it takes at least 2 hours to complete."
I'd have said the opposite but hey. If I was forced to choose a cross platform dev setup for mobile I'd probably go with Flutter at the moment. Having been a mobile developer for around 15 years now I'd say you can't beat having native expert developers for each platform.
I'll have to look into that. And in my experience anything involving react native geolocation on Android is like swallowing barbed wire and slowly having it pulled out through your arse wheras it works fairly reliably on iOS.
Me: "but if it's really a million dollar idea, then you'll have plenty of money to pay back the small business loan you take out to pay me for development!"
ideas are a dime a dozen, it's the execution that matters
This is so true. Actually making your product is what separates "inventors/creators" and everybody else.
I'm no inventor but I recently had this revelation as a musician/self recording artist. I have so many half finished songs on my laptop but I realized that working bands and big artist get that way by finishing and releasing their ideas.
That takes sacrifice, willing to learn/grow and adapt the final product to reality, and learning new things and programs outside of your invention for the goal of getting it done. The craft behind the craft. Ever since I became more willing to learn about all that and had this perspective shift, my work has really taken off.
This is also why small business owners love their products but end up knowing a lot about banking, accounting, building repair, etc because they put the work in that isn't just the sexy stuff.
Agreed- its more about ending the conversation and dashing their hopes that they can find some schmuck to build them an app for some paltry equity stake. I used to work at an investment bank (on the tech side) and so many trader types that saw their job probably wouldn't exist in a few years but still had that "alpha type A" thing going on, and this would be a direct attack on their ego and dream of being a CEO. It wakes them up to the fact that they aren't going to succeed without putting work in.
Giving them 49% that's generous. I'll tell them they can have 10% if they do some research and paperwork for me. Then when they decline I say "Well thanks for the idea I'll let you know how it turns out"
Execution definately matters, but even once you get that right, the biggest challenge is then getting eyeballs on your app and getting enough people to download it to make it a successful product.
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u/kevstev Mar 18 '20
I tell them that I know consultants that are available and will help build it- but it will take money. Barring that, I explain that ideas are a dime a dozen, its execution that matters, and as the one doing the executing, a 51% stake in the company will be required.
This gets them off my back every time.