How to calculate the approximate cost of development for 3 minutes
Pricing in the mobile application market remains opaque. Approximate prices are sometimes called at random, and more accurate figures have to wait for weeks. Fortunately, you can find out the cost of development yourself, and much faster.
How we ordered the application
My father-in has his own car service. Great experience, great masters, the time for the month ahead is planned out. Here are just a record each client had to be on the phone, referring to the schedule. Inconvenient. We decided to automate this process using a mobile application.
The application should have been able to do the following things:
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- help to choose a convenient time for the visit;
- place an order for the purchase of necessary spare parts;
- show on the map how to get to the service.
It remains only to choose a developer and find out the price. In our subjective opinion, such a project should have cost about 150 thousand rubles. We placed an ad on freelance exchanges and waited. After a few minutes, the first potential performers began to appear.
Such a price range surprised us greatly. How can the same application cost between 150 and 350 thousand? It seems that many developers estimate services like this:
Planner, store and GPS ... There are two or three months of work here, so let it be 350,000.
Or so:
This order must be ours! Let's call the price a little less, and then wind it up.
We agreed to give an exact assessment only after considering the technical task. It took another week. At the same time, the total amount was twice as large as the one that was initially indicated (150 thousand → 290 thousand).
The preliminary assessment is sometimes too far from accurate.
After that, I decided to look at professional studios, and at the same time to figure out how to get a reliable estimate in less than a week.
As usual, the cost of development is estimated.
The development process is difficult to fit into the cost framework. Especially if you do not have a detailed idea of what the final product should be.
The maximum that a developer can do is to name the range of prices on which to focus. It takes from one to three days. In this case, the resulting estimate is not always true.
From 150,000 to full customer satisfaction.
The exact cost can be announced after the requirements are agreed upon and a prototype is created. At this stage, the main vectors of further developer actions are determined. The extra requirements are discarded, the missing ones are recorded.
The prototype gives a vision of what the finished application will be.
Knowing this, you can easily estimate the cost of development.
To create a prototype takes from two to five weeks. The cost estimate is more accurate, but takes a long time. Fortunately, there is an easier way.
Easy way
After surfing the Internet, I found several foreign sites that offer to estimate the cost of development using special calculators. Howmuchtomakeanapp.com and otreva.com seemed to me the most convenient. They have different evaluation criteria, so they give different results. They estimated the development of my application at $ 24,000 and $ 36,750 respectively.
From the Russian counterparts, I liked the calculator from TheBestApp studio. He estimated my application at 323 thousand rubles. By removing a few non-essential options, the price managed to be brought down to 259 thousand. It took me three minutes to complete the assessment.
How it works
Working with a calculator is like going to the store. Choose the right ingredients and add to yourself. For each position there is a description, and the final cost changes in real time. If you go beyond the budget, you can go back and remove unnecessary.
In addition, the calculator helps to form a clear vision of the finished product. Need push notifications? Should users log in via Facebook or Google+? Initially, we did not even think about such things.
The calculator helps to determine the set of necessary functions and find out how much it will cost.
How objective is it
In TheBestApp admitted that the cost will be different from the estimated, if you need to implement some additional functionality or if the application will work with a heavily loaded server (like Avito or Uber). In all other cases, the development is carried out at the prices indicated in the calculator.
The same policy is followed by foreign developers.
Conclusion
No calculator can tell you the exact cost of development. The main task of this tool is to show how much those functions that should be in the application will cost. It helps the customer to determine the budget and better understand their needs, and the developer to assess the amount of further work without plunging into the wilds of the technical assignment. You can try here:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/314916/
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