9 ms·

Q: “How much does an app cost?” A: “About as much as a car.”

203 points by vlokshin 14y ago

dirkdk 14y ago
yeah, or as much as a building. Ranging from the dog house to the new Freedom tower
prezjordan 14y ago
Question for HN (loaded one): What do you consider to be the most "expensive" app (in history) in terms of development cost? EDIT: Clarification - mobile app, as stated in the article.
- farhadabas 14y ago
  Off the top of my head, Color?
  - wingerlang 14y ago
    How come?
    - jameswyse 14y ago
      They raised like $41 million and shut the app down a year later. see: http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/color-shuts-down/ http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/color-shuts-down/
- zizee 14y ago
  Depends on your definition of "App". The article is concentrating on mobile application, which is probably the definition you are using. Regardless, I don't have an opinion on the most expensive mobile app, but your question made me think of a recent bit of news where the US military spent over 1 Billion dollars on an ERP system and the project is being scrapped. Ouch. http://www.dailytech.com/USAF+Concedes+1B+USD+Data+Project+Was+Pretty+Much+Useless/article29198.htm http://www.dailytech.com/USAF+Concedes+1B+USD+Data+Project+W...
- jaggederest 14y ago
  Probably Google search and it's ads, at this point. Crawlers, multicontinent data centers, etc. etc. Easily billions of dollars.
  - fosk 14y ago
    If "app" includes any kind of app and not only mobile, then I would say Microsoft Windows.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the winner would be the IRS's modernization program, which was to write new software to process tax returns. It began over 16 years ago and has consumed over $12 billion (just for the software development portion). $4 billion was spent on the first attempt at writing this software before they gave up in 1997 with no usable product. That's a $4 billion "app" nobody ever used. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-01-31/news/1997031030_1_modern-computer-systems-irs-computers-paper-tax-returns http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-01-31/news/1997031030_... It's been a few years since I read about it so things may have changed, but last read was they spent another $8 billion in the 2000s trying again, this time outsourcing the development to consulting firms with thousands of developers. And around 2005/2006 had yet to produce a system the IRS could use, forcing them to continue processing tax returns with paper and antiquated systems.
  - fosk 14y ago
    The estimated payroll costs for Windows Vista are estimated to be 10B. Now consider the costs for every Windows version released since 1985, and include R&D/marketing expenses. http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003460386_btview04.html http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003460386_b...
    - dangrossman 14y ago
      But that's an operating system, not an application. You've got to give credit to the IRS spending more on one application than Microsoft spent on their OS.
      - jrockway 14y ago
        OSes are not particularly complicated. I could imagine that tax laws require a lot more code (and tests) than dragging some windows around and scheduling processes. (Neither are easy, of course.)
      - lurker14 14y ago
        That "one application" was software+hardware tasked with managing millions of hand-written paper forms. The electronic version of tax filing was far cheaper, and launched successfully.
- whatusername 14y ago
  System/360 (if you can count it as an app) was supposed to be $5 billion in the 1960's. So $34B + in todays dollars. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0407 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayint... (And if you include the cost of further development of z/OS over the years that goes much much higher again)
  - rhizome 14y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the priciest projects with the best ROI, though.
    - whatusername 14y ago
      Actually, thinking in terms of largest total return for a project (ROI is infinite if your I is 0).. I can't think of too many projects that have had larger returns. Probably the iPhone? Maybe some Cars (camry? Model T?) Maybe some really big mining/oil operations? What else is in the same league?
      - rhizome 14y ago
        To be sure, there has been marginal investment over the years in maintaining absolute backward compatibility through the zSeries/zOS.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  You're getting a lot of replies that aren't mobile apps, but just software products in general. In terms of mobile apps my money (hah!) is on one of the many medical apps that are in development - we're talking about apps intended for use by medical professionals in actual medical institutions. Not only are they extremely costly to develop (someone's got to pay the army of consultants, after all), they face incredibly costly certification processes before they can see any actual users.
  - 13hours 14y ago
    You're right. We're an app dev company, and we're in the process of developing a medical app for a client. The FDA approval process makes it very time consuming.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
      Do you/they have to submit a 510(k) or is there a different mechanism?
- scheff 14y ago
  I would guess Facebook because they would be changing it on a daily basis to keep it consistent with their web version, and adding dedicated functionality unique to the mobile platform.
- GlennS 14y ago
  Here's a competitor for that title, the NHS National Program for IT. The plan was to build a patient records system to run in every hospital in the UK. It was billed as the biggest IT project ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
  - aneth4 14y ago
    Wow. 20 billion pounds expected with unclear outcome. I have to wonder what the scope of such a project looks like to come within 2 orders of magnitude of that number.
    - polymatter 14y ago
      And its still counting. I have a friend working in IT in the NHS and they are still spending money hand over fist on transforming digital records. Basically, nobody wants to be accused of putting tax money before accuracy of patient records which essentially means blank cheque and unbounded scope.
swanson 14y ago
Ha! A car? That's cheap! Big companies can't risk going with a freelancer (who might go out of business or be booked when they need updates) so they put out an RFP to software firms. A month or so of upfront design (wireframes, screen design, user stories). Another couple of weeks of iterations to get signed off by the branding/marketing group. The development will need a team, four developers is about right (we need to get this app out fast in the ever-changing mobile landscape). We'll need a manager at half time and a team lead to handle client meetings. Throw in a dedicated test engineer (so many phones to test on these days...) and a month for formal test plans and execution (did we mention this app might be audited? test plan is 500 pages). Make sure it is localized as well - we are a global company with global customers, all of whom we value. We also don't want to be sued, so we'll need a EULA screen that the user must accept. And a help page. And a way to register on our site. Oh yeah, the way our budgets work, we've only got one shot at getting money for this app - can't do a minimal release and update it after it's in the store. Conversative costs for an app in the OP's "BMW Tier": One month upfront design at $100/hr (1 designer, 1 dev): ~$30k Three months of development at $100/hr (4 dev, 1 test): ~$250k Three months for PM at $150/hr (0.5 PM): ~$40k One month formal resting at $100/hr (1 test): ~$15k Monthly maintenance/update 20hr/month (1 dev): ~$25k Total: Over $350,000 for the version 1.0 of your mobile app (on a single platform) Apps ain't cheap.
- samps 14y ago
  You sound like you're disagreeing with the OP, but the article explicitly calls out a $400K+ category of app development if you "do everything right". I think you're on the same page as the author here.
  - swanson 14y ago
    Edited to clarify. The above example would be the enterprise version of his second tier, the $20k BMW
- Zak 14y ago
  The Bugatti Veyron SS costs approximately $2.7M. That's about the top of the price range for new-production road cars. Owning and operating a world-class race car costs more and tends to be budgeted as a lifecycle rather than a one-time purchase. I'm sure someone else can come up with witty analogies for apps, but I think the model holds. Outsourcing the development of an app costs as much as a car, for some value of car. You get what you pay for, and the things that cost a lot at the high end aren't immediately obvious to people not in the business.
hrabago 14y ago
I was once contacted by a company who wanted to purchase my code to use for their app for their company. It wasn't a flashy app, but had a few time-consuming, and at the time, unique features. I gave my starting point - $10k. I expected them to come back to negotiate, but I think they were taken aback at the price I quoted and decided to go another way. I suspected they instead outsourced it or developed it in house. Several months after that (likely over a year) I checked the App Store for their company name, and they still did not have an app. Whenever I remember that episode, I wonder if they ever realized that the deal I offered them was actually reasonable.
- hboon 14y ago
  Someone offered to buy an entire app from me, a paid iOS app that was making stable income and has a proven codebase. I quoted 80k (or was it 100k) and the enquirer was shocked, replying that he was assuming a 10k price tag. And he is a CTO of a startup.
  - Gustomaximus 14y ago
    There needs to be a clear distinction between pricing for an existing app vs pricing for building one from scratch. If the former this will be priced based on revenue, potential revenue and how much the owner wants to keep it. If building from scratch then the cost has to be based more towards developer/admin hours. So given your app existed then potentially $10k could be a great price no matter how many hours you put into it if; you not particularly fussed about keeping it from an enjoyment sense, it makes sub $1000 per year in revenue and you don't see yourself creating significant future revenue from it.
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  It's not just a matter of convincing them what the market rate for software is. It's convincing them that it's worth that rate to them. If I had a nickel for every time I was approached by someone with a spec that exceeded their purchasing authority (usually by an order of magnitude), I would be a very rich man. There are a lot of mondays out there where some manager says "We need an app, here's $10k signing authority, go figure it out" and what they do is e-mail 3 developers for quotes. Each developer looks to the right, looks to the left, and sees competition, so there's social proof that there's money in the deal. Exactly one sales rep has a brain in his head, and uses the situation to score a meeting with an actual decisionmaker to talk about a totally different project that might be worth paying actual money for. Everybody else just expenses a few lunches and enjoys pretending that meetings are work. But despite all the social proof, there's usually no real desire (within several multiples of required effort, anyway) to actually produce anything. It's just some lower manager read in a magazine article somewhere that they need an app, and they have the authority to use the corporate letterhead and book conference rooms, and nothing better to book meetings about.
freyrs3 14y ago
Replace the word "app" with "custom software" and you'll see how ludicrous this article sounds.
- vlokshin 14y ago
  TL;DR ad-lib with "custom software" would be: Custom Software can cost a variable of extreme prices, depending on who's building it and exactly what is wanted out of the custom software. What's so ludicrous about that? Maybe read the article and not just the title?
  - mseebach2 14y ago
    The point is that "app" means application. "What does an application cost?" - well, is it a CLI that prints the current time in the terminal? Or is it Microsoft Word? You can get a fully functional well polished fart button app for both iOS and Android made for less than $4k, but I doubt you could make something like the Facebook app on even one platform for $400k.
    - bennyg 14y ago
      Any iOS dev worth his/her salt could make a well-polished fart button app in under an hour and for less than $100. But no iOS dev worth their salt is gonna' do that.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  What about if you replace 'custom software' with 'custom car'? Then it would sound about right again... ;)
  - netcan 14y ago
    That would defeat the whole point of the analogy which is to compare to something familiar. Nobody is familiar with buying "custom cars" Custom houses is something that people are familiar with. It's an incredibly stressful and unpredictable undertaking for most people. But compared to custom software, its nothing. A custom house might cost 20% more than what was expected. It might take twice as long. Software might cost 2000% more than expected and the end result might be nothing like what the buyer though they were going to get.
eggmonster 14y ago
I've been 'struggling' with this lately. I have app dev experience but not really anything to show in public so I have been offering to do apps at $2k-ish as a portfolio building exercise. Maybe I anchored it too low or this is just how it is, but I received a fair few messages asking if I'd go sub $1000 or work on a pay-if-we-like-it/if we make money basis.
- MortenK 14y ago
  You are going to have very painful projects at that price range. The customers will be entirely out of touch with reality, if they think below $1000 is "fair" for an app (or really any kind of custom software). Expect such projects to drag on and on, and be very sure to get at least some payment upfront, as these kinds of customers also tend to forget or be "too busy" to pay their bills. Also, stay far, far away from the pay-if-we-like-it, pay-if-we-make-money schemes.
- josephlord 14y ago
  Unless you are desperate for the cash can't you do some simple but nice utilities to put in the app store as your portfolio. If they are good enough to charge for you might get a trickle of revenue and if not you still have the portfolio. You also get to choose what you demonstrate rather than what a client wants you to do and you won't be stuck implementing someone else's design mistakes and putting them in your portfolio.
- skisly 14y ago
  If company building app for 2000 and it's not one page. Company should recognize it will be piece of junk.2000 it's just 20 hours of work. What you can build in 3 day? When dev guy building his portfolio that mean this guy doesn't have experience. So he will make 1000 bugs. And it's normal later he will be good (maybe). So question is are do you ready to pay money to teach someone? Or you just need good app
AngryParsley 14y ago
/me checks http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vlokshin http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vlokshin > about: I love web apps and my team is amazing. http://www.darwinapps.com http://www.darwinapps.com /me checks http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vlokshin http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vlokshin All submissions but one are darwinapps.com. The exception is vladlokshin.com. Nice marketing. I'm not against self-promotion, but it makes me wary when someone uses their account solely for that purpose. I'd prefer that people contribute to the community instead of just submitting links they stand to gain from.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  Submissions isn't a good metric. patio11 is one of the most respected members of the community, and 11 of his 17 submissions are articles he wrote: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11
- vlokshin 14y ago
  Good call. I need to forward vladlokshin.com to DarwinApps.com If you wrote a blog post about apps pricing & expectations, ran an app dev shop, and frequented HN, wouldn't that be only logical to do if you posted something? Nice detective skills, but I'm not hiding anything.
  - napoleond 14y ago
    No kidding. I'm really glad you posted--my company is (by my estimation) a couple of years behind yours, and I think we can learn a lot from the way you guys are doing things, so thanks!
    - vlokshin 14y ago
      You'd probably be surprised at how new/young we are, but I appreciate the unintentional compliment :) In reality, we've been doing this outside of our 9-5s for a couple of years (with the majority of the "we" coming together while trying to build a few internal projects). Most of our dev team has been full-time for a bit over 1 year now. Start-ups are rough and when you're bootstrapping through consulting, some months are great, and some months are rough. I kept my full-time to feed in money during the bad months to keep the machine growing at times that I knew it was in the right direction. I had that job up until a little over a month ago. The full-time job was actually great (consulting at the US HQ of a top-tier German car company, ironically enough) but I'm awful at working for someone else, there was too much talent and goodness brewing behind the DarwinApps team, and I was clearly the bottleneck. It's not easy doing something like this while you have a 9-5, but if you're young and single, it's doable. I'm not saying it's not doable otherwise, just speaking from what I know. We are by no means a success just yet, but most of the core team is finally in one of two offices, working on the same problems full-time. It's a beautiful thing, but it's by no means a success just yet. That being said, a lot of awesome people helped me with advice along the way. I'd love to help if you have any specific questions, think I could answer them, and if you think it would help progress your company in the right direction. Feel free to email me: Vlad (at) DarwinApps.com
netcan 14y ago
This blog goes back to the complicated issue of people who don't understand software needing to buy software. The part that this analogy misses is that a $400k app is not necessarily going to be better than the $4k one, or even very different. The interplay between costs, quality, tradeoffs, choices, project management, etc is way too complicated for someone without some experience in the process to "get." "Websites" were the first piece of bespoke "software" that every company needed. The "how much does a website cost" was a question that "websites-for-companies" people still don't really know how to answer. Clients are still bewildered by quotes orders of magnitude appart. I wonder if the intelligence level here is growing though. An experienced business owner (say, a 15 year veteran) by this stage will probably have paid for (or at least been involved in) a handful of such projects.
aes256 14y ago
It'll cost you a whole lot more if BMW were to sue you for stealing their start button design for an app icon...
gabemart 14y ago
I'm not a developer. I've been considering paying someone to develop an iOS app for an upcoming project I've been working on which is based around subscription to a magazine-like service. The application would need to: * Be built around the Newsstand APIs to display text content * Allow in-app subscription with a free trial * Display text content with appealing and highly readable typography That's pretty much it. Is the $1-$5k range reasonable for an app like this? From my perspective, it would be about as simple as an application could be (displaying simple pushed text content) but I realize that as a non-developer I'm not really qualified to make that call.
- mantas 14y ago
  As a freelance iOS developer, there're a lot of price-defining parts missing. However, I'm sure it's not possible for $1. I might take on such a project for $4-5k, but I'd insist on locking down the scope and charge you extra for anything after basics. I'm living in relatively low cost country mind you..
  - gabemart 14y ago
    Thanks for your response. Could you give me an idea of the principle missing price-defining parts?
    - mantas 14y ago
      Few things off the top of my head: - How difficult is the appearance? Some people say simple black-on-white is ok, some want advanced dynamic stuff - How much of a design do you want? Custom colors, buttons, icons etc - How much content do you want to pack in it? Some huge relatively simple apps require significant optimisations to work smoothly - Who is responsible for the server side of the app? Some people assume iOS dev will take care of CMS as well - Non-iOS services compatibility. Syncing with on-iOS subscriptions, making sure content looks the same in web app or android or smth. - optional minor features that add up quite a lot of code/time. Feedback, analytics etc.
      - 14y ago
Dove 14y ago
Day-UM! I am not charging enough for Android work.
ISL 14y ago
"I want something that works on anything" -- '97 Subaru Outback Wagon. Hauls the kids, handles rough roads well, gets through snow, reasonably easy to work on, easy parts availability, predictable maintenance schedule. ~$3-6000 used on Craigslist.
paulnelligan 14y ago
OR, you could just get off your ass and build it yourself ... monetary cost: $0, time cost: 6 months, benefit: you now have an extra skillset and the ability to execute your ideas Building a car by oneself is unrealistic, building an app is completely feasible.

203 points by vlokshin 14y ago

yeah, or as much as a building. Ranging from the dog house to the new Freedom tower

Question for HN (loaded one): What do you consider to be the most "expensive" app (in history) in terms of development cost? EDIT: Clarification - mobile app, as stated in the article.

farhadabas 14y ago
Off the top of my head, Color?
- wingerlang 14y ago
  How come?
  - jameswyse 14y ago
    They raised like $41 million and shut the app down a year later. see: http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/color-shuts-down/ http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/color-shuts-down/
zizee 14y ago
Depends on your definition of "App". The article is concentrating on mobile application, which is probably the definition you are using. Regardless, I don't have an opinion on the most expensive mobile app, but your question made me think of a recent bit of news where the US military spent over 1 Billion dollars on an ERP system and the project is being scrapped. Ouch. http://www.dailytech.com/USAF+Concedes+1B+USD+Data+Project+Was+Pretty+Much+Useless/article29198.htm http://www.dailytech.com/USAF+Concedes+1B+USD+Data+Project+W...
jaggederest 14y ago
Probably Google search and it's ads, at this point. Crawlers, multicontinent data centers, etc. etc. Easily billions of dollars.
- fosk 14y ago
  If "app" includes any kind of app and not only mobile, then I would say Microsoft Windows.
dangrossman 14y ago
I'm pretty sure the winner would be the IRS's modernization program, which was to write new software to process tax returns. It began over 16 years ago and has consumed over $12 billion (just for the software development portion). $4 billion was spent on the first attempt at writing this software before they gave up in 1997 with no usable product. That's a $4 billion "app" nobody ever used. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-01-31/news/1997031030_1_modern-computer-systems-irs-computers-paper-tax-returns http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-01-31/news/1997031030_... It's been a few years since I read about it so things may have changed, but last read was they spent another $8 billion in the 2000s trying again, this time outsourcing the development to consulting firms with thousands of developers. And around 2005/2006 had yet to produce a system the IRS could use, forcing them to continue processing tax returns with paper and antiquated systems.
- fosk 14y ago
  The estimated payroll costs for Windows Vista are estimated to be 10B. Now consider the costs for every Windows version released since 1985, and include R&D/marketing expenses. http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003460386_btview04.html http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003460386_b...
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    But that's an operating system, not an application. You've got to give credit to the IRS spending more on one application than Microsoft spent on their OS.
    - jrockway 14y ago
      OSes are not particularly complicated. I could imagine that tax laws require a lot more code (and tests) than dragging some windows around and scheduling processes. (Neither are easy, of course.)
    - lurker14 14y ago
      That "one application" was software+hardware tasked with managing millions of hand-written paper forms. The electronic version of tax filing was far cheaper, and launched successfully.
whatusername 14y ago
System/360 (if you can count it as an app) was supposed to be $5 billion in the 1960's. So $34B + in todays dollars. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0407 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayint... (And if you include the cost of further development of z/OS over the years that goes much much higher again)
- rhizome 14y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the priciest projects with the best ROI, though.
  - whatusername 14y ago
    Actually, thinking in terms of largest total return for a project (ROI is infinite if your I is 0).. I can't think of too many projects that have had larger returns. Probably the iPhone? Maybe some Cars (camry? Model T?) Maybe some really big mining/oil operations? What else is in the same league?
    - rhizome 14y ago
      To be sure, there has been marginal investment over the years in maintaining absolute backward compatibility through the zSeries/zOS.
potatolicious 14y ago
You're getting a lot of replies that aren't mobile apps, but just software products in general. In terms of mobile apps my money (hah!) is on one of the many medical apps that are in development - we're talking about apps intended for use by medical professionals in actual medical institutions. Not only are they extremely costly to develop (someone's got to pay the army of consultants, after all), they face incredibly costly certification processes before they can see any actual users.
- 13hours 14y ago
  You're right. We're an app dev company, and we're in the process of developing a medical app for a client. The FDA approval process makes it very time consuming.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
    Do you/they have to submit a 510(k) or is there a different mechanism?
scheff 14y ago
I would guess Facebook because they would be changing it on a daily basis to keep it consistent with their web version, and adding dedicated functionality unique to the mobile platform.
GlennS 14y ago
Here's a competitor for that title, the NHS National Program for IT. The plan was to build a patient records system to run in every hospital in the UK. It was billed as the biggest IT project ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
- aneth4 14y ago
  Wow. 20 billion pounds expected with unclear outcome. I have to wonder what the scope of such a project looks like to come within 2 orders of magnitude of that number.
  - polymatter 14y ago
    And its still counting. I have a friend working in IT in the NHS and they are still spending money hand over fist on transforming digital records. Basically, nobody wants to be accused of putting tax money before accuracy of patient records which essentially means blank cheque and unbounded scope.

swanson 14y ago

Ha! A car? That's cheap! Big companies can't risk going with a freelancer (who might go out of business or be booked when they need updates) so they put out an RFP to software firms. A month or so of upfront design (wireframes, screen design, user stories). Another couple of weeks of iterations to get signed off by the branding/marketing group. The development will need a team, four developers is about right (we need to get this app out fast in the ever-changing mobile landscape). We'll need a manager at half time and a team lead to handle client meetings. Throw in a dedicated test engineer (so many phones to test on these days...) and a month for formal test plans and execution (did we mention this app might be audited? test plan is 500 pages). Make sure it is localized as well - we are a global company with global customers, all of whom we value. We also don't want to be sued, so we'll need a EULA screen that the user must accept. And a help page. And a way to register on our site. Oh yeah, the way our budgets work, we've only got one shot at getting money for this app - can't do a minimal release and update it after it's in the store. Conversative costs for an app in the OP's "BMW Tier": One month upfront design at $100/hr (1 designer, 1 dev): ~$30k Three months of development at $100/hr (4 dev, 1 test): ~$250k Three months for PM at $150/hr (0.5 PM): ~$40k One month formal resting at $100/hr (1 test): ~$15k Monthly maintenance/update 20hr/month (1 dev): ~$25k Total: Over $350,000 for the version 1.0 of your mobile app (on a single platform) Apps ain't cheap.

samps 14y ago
You sound like you're disagreeing with the OP, but the article explicitly calls out a $400K+ category of app development if you "do everything right". I think you're on the same page as the author here.
- swanson 14y ago
  Edited to clarify. The above example would be the enterprise version of his second tier, the $20k BMW
Zak 14y ago
The Bugatti Veyron SS costs approximately $2.7M. That's about the top of the price range for new-production road cars. Owning and operating a world-class race car costs more and tends to be budgeted as a lifecycle rather than a one-time purchase. I'm sure someone else can come up with witty analogies for apps, but I think the model holds. Outsourcing the development of an app costs as much as a car, for some value of car. You get what you pay for, and the things that cost a lot at the high end aren't immediately obvious to people not in the business.

hrabago 14y ago

I was once contacted by a company who wanted to purchase my code to use for their app for their company. It wasn't a flashy app, but had a few time-consuming, and at the time, unique features. I gave my starting point - $10k. I expected them to come back to negotiate, but I think they were taken aback at the price I quoted and decided to go another way. I suspected they instead outsourced it or developed it in house. Several months after that (likely over a year) I checked the App Store for their company name, and they still did not have an app. Whenever I remember that episode, I wonder if they ever realized that the deal I offered them was actually reasonable.

hboon 14y ago
Someone offered to buy an entire app from me, a paid iOS app that was making stable income and has a proven codebase. I quoted 80k (or was it 100k) and the enquirer was shocked, replying that he was assuming a 10k price tag. And he is a CTO of a startup.
- Gustomaximus 14y ago
  There needs to be a clear distinction between pricing for an existing app vs pricing for building one from scratch. If the former this will be priced based on revenue, potential revenue and how much the owner wants to keep it. If building from scratch then the cost has to be based more towards developer/admin hours. So given your app existed then potentially $10k could be a great price no matter how many hours you put into it if; you not particularly fussed about keeping it from an enjoyment sense, it makes sub $1000 per year in revenue and you don't see yourself creating significant future revenue from it.
drewcrawford 14y ago
It's not just a matter of convincing them what the market rate for software is. It's convincing them that it's worth that rate to them. If I had a nickel for every time I was approached by someone with a spec that exceeded their purchasing authority (usually by an order of magnitude), I would be a very rich man. There are a lot of mondays out there where some manager says "We need an app, here's $10k signing authority, go figure it out" and what they do is e-mail 3 developers for quotes. Each developer looks to the right, looks to the left, and sees competition, so there's social proof that there's money in the deal. Exactly one sales rep has a brain in his head, and uses the situation to score a meeting with an actual decisionmaker to talk about a totally different project that might be worth paying actual money for. Everybody else just expenses a few lunches and enjoys pretending that meetings are work. But despite all the social proof, there's usually no real desire (within several multiples of required effort, anyway) to actually produce anything. It's just some lower manager read in a magazine article somewhere that they need an app, and they have the authority to use the corporate letterhead and book conference rooms, and nothing better to book meetings about.

freyrs3 14y ago

Replace the word "app" with "custom software" and you'll see how ludicrous this article sounds.

vlokshin 14y ago
TL;DR ad-lib with "custom software" would be: Custom Software can cost a variable of extreme prices, depending on who's building it and exactly what is wanted out of the custom software. What's so ludicrous about that? Maybe read the article and not just the title?
- mseebach2 14y ago
  The point is that "app" means application. "What does an application cost?" - well, is it a CLI that prints the current time in the terminal? Or is it Microsoft Word? You can get a fully functional well polished fart button app for both iOS and Android made for less than $4k, but I doubt you could make something like the Facebook app on even one platform for $400k.
  - bennyg 14y ago
    Any iOS dev worth his/her salt could make a well-polished fart button app in under an hour and for less than $100. But no iOS dev worth their salt is gonna' do that.
mtrimpe 14y ago
What about if you replace 'custom software' with 'custom car'? Then it would sound about right again... ;)
- netcan 14y ago
  That would defeat the whole point of the analogy which is to compare to something familiar. Nobody is familiar with buying "custom cars" Custom houses is something that people are familiar with. It's an incredibly stressful and unpredictable undertaking for most people. But compared to custom software, its nothing. A custom house might cost 20% more than what was expected. It might take twice as long. Software might cost 2000% more than expected and the end result might be nothing like what the buyer though they were going to get.

eggmonster 14y ago

I've been 'struggling' with this lately. I have app dev experience but not really anything to show in public so I have been offering to do apps at $2k-ish as a portfolio building exercise. Maybe I anchored it too low or this is just how it is, but I received a fair few messages asking if I'd go sub $1000 or work on a pay-if-we-like-it/if we make money basis.

MortenK 14y ago
You are going to have very painful projects at that price range. The customers will be entirely out of touch with reality, if they think below $1000 is "fair" for an app (or really any kind of custom software). Expect such projects to drag on and on, and be very sure to get at least some payment upfront, as these kinds of customers also tend to forget or be "too busy" to pay their bills. Also, stay far, far away from the pay-if-we-like-it, pay-if-we-make-money schemes.
josephlord 14y ago
Unless you are desperate for the cash can't you do some simple but nice utilities to put in the app store as your portfolio. If they are good enough to charge for you might get a trickle of revenue and if not you still have the portfolio. You also get to choose what you demonstrate rather than what a client wants you to do and you won't be stuck implementing someone else's design mistakes and putting them in your portfolio.
skisly 14y ago
If company building app for 2000 and it's not one page. Company should recognize it will be piece of junk.2000 it's just 20 hours of work. What you can build in 3 day? When dev guy building his portfolio that mean this guy doesn't have experience. So he will make 1000 bugs. And it's normal later he will be good (maybe). So question is are do you ready to pay money to teach someone? Or you just need good app

AngryParsley 14y ago

/me checks http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vlokshin http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vlokshin > about: I love web apps and my team is amazing. http://www.darwinapps.com http://www.darwinapps.com /me checks http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vlokshin http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vlokshin All submissions but one are darwinapps.com. The exception is vladlokshin.com. Nice marketing. I'm not against self-promotion, but it makes me wary when someone uses their account solely for that purpose. I'd prefer that people contribute to the community instead of just submitting links they stand to gain from.

SatvikBeri 14y ago
Submissions isn't a good metric. patio11 is one of the most respected members of the community, and 11 of his 17 submissions are articles he wrote: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11
vlokshin 14y ago
Good call. I need to forward vladlokshin.com to DarwinApps.com If you wrote a blog post about apps pricing & expectations, ran an app dev shop, and frequented HN, wouldn't that be only logical to do if you posted something? Nice detective skills, but I'm not hiding anything.
- napoleond 14y ago
  No kidding. I'm really glad you posted--my company is (by my estimation) a couple of years behind yours, and I think we can learn a lot from the way you guys are doing things, so thanks!
  - vlokshin 14y ago
    You'd probably be surprised at how new/young we are, but I appreciate the unintentional compliment :) In reality, we've been doing this outside of our 9-5s for a couple of years (with the majority of the "we" coming together while trying to build a few internal projects). Most of our dev team has been full-time for a bit over 1 year now. Start-ups are rough and when you're bootstrapping through consulting, some months are great, and some months are rough. I kept my full-time to feed in money during the bad months to keep the machine growing at times that I knew it was in the right direction. I had that job up until a little over a month ago. The full-time job was actually great (consulting at the US HQ of a top-tier German car company, ironically enough) but I'm awful at working for someone else, there was too much talent and goodness brewing behind the DarwinApps team, and I was clearly the bottleneck. It's not easy doing something like this while you have a 9-5, but if you're young and single, it's doable. I'm not saying it's not doable otherwise, just speaking from what I know. We are by no means a success just yet, but most of the core team is finally in one of two offices, working on the same problems full-time. It's a beautiful thing, but it's by no means a success just yet. That being said, a lot of awesome people helped me with advice along the way. I'd love to help if you have any specific questions, think I could answer them, and if you think it would help progress your company in the right direction. Feel free to email me: Vlad (at) DarwinApps.com

netcan 14y ago

This blog goes back to the complicated issue of people who don't understand software needing to buy software. The part that this analogy misses is that a $400k app is not necessarily going to be better than the $4k one, or even very different. The interplay between costs, quality, tradeoffs, choices, project management, etc is way too complicated for someone without some experience in the process to "get." "Websites" were the first piece of bespoke "software" that every company needed. The "how much does a website cost" was a question that "websites-for-companies" people still don't really know how to answer. Clients are still bewildered by quotes orders of magnitude appart. I wonder if the intelligence level here is growing though. An experienced business owner (say, a 15 year veteran) by this stage will probably have paid for (or at least been involved in) a handful of such projects.

aes256 14y ago

It'll cost you a whole lot more if BMW were to sue you for stealing their start button design for an app icon...

gabemart 14y ago

I'm not a developer. I've been considering paying someone to develop an iOS app for an upcoming project I've been working on which is based around subscription to a magazine-like service. The application would need to: * Be built around the Newsstand APIs to display text content * Allow in-app subscription with a free trial * Display text content with appealing and highly readable typography That's pretty much it. Is the $1-$5k range reasonable for an app like this? From my perspective, it would be about as simple as an application could be (displaying simple pushed text content) but I realize that as a non-developer I'm not really qualified to make that call.

mantas 14y ago
As a freelance iOS developer, there're a lot of price-defining parts missing. However, I'm sure it's not possible for $1. I might take on such a project for $4-5k, but I'd insist on locking down the scope and charge you extra for anything after basics. I'm living in relatively low cost country mind you..
- gabemart 14y ago
  Thanks for your response. Could you give me an idea of the principle missing price-defining parts?
  - mantas 14y ago
    Few things off the top of my head: - How difficult is the appearance? Some people say simple black-on-white is ok, some want advanced dynamic stuff - How much of a design do you want? Custom colors, buttons, icons etc - How much content do you want to pack in it? Some huge relatively simple apps require significant optimisations to work smoothly - Who is responsible for the server side of the app? Some people assume iOS dev will take care of CMS as well - Non-iOS services compatibility. Syncing with on-iOS subscriptions, making sure content looks the same in web app or android or smth. - optional minor features that add up quite a lot of code/time. Feedback, analytics etc.
    - 14y ago

Dove 14y ago

Day-UM! I am not charging enough for Android work.

ISL 14y ago

"I want something that works on anything" -- '97 Subaru Outback Wagon. Hauls the kids, handles rough roads well, gets through snow, reasonably easy to work on, easy parts availability, predictable maintenance schedule. ~$3-6000 used on Craigslist.

paulnelligan 14y ago

OR, you could just get off your ass and build it yourself ... monetary cost: $0, time cost: 6 months, benefit: you now have an extra skillset and the ability to execute your ideas Building a car by oneself is unrealistic, building an app is completely feasible.