I’ve come across some government agencies and other businesses claiming they’d spent millions of dollars developing an app. How can developing an app could cost so much money?
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I do a lot of technical and software consulting for government agencies. In the consulting world everything is billed by time (usually in 1/4 hour or 1/10 hour) chunks.
If you have a 1 hour regularly-scheduled meeting with clients, you’ll usually need at least 1 technical resource, 1 business analyst, and one project manager. You may only have 2/3 of those but you get the idea. Each one of those people is billed anywhere from $150-250/hour. It’s not unusual for every meeting to cost over $1000/hr. If you have 48 of those weekly meetings per year, you just spent nearly 50k on status meetings. You haven’t even built anything yet.
Enterprise software development is time consuming. identifying all of the business logic (what are the things that can happen? And what should happen when those things happen?) is a huge undertaking. You have to be able to answer at least a chunk of those questions before you can even start writing code. Enterprise software also often interacts with old systems that do things differently. They may not work as cleanly with new tools and methods of coding. All of these things cost a huge amount of time and money to work with. Contrast that with one guy writing a startup app from scratch. He can make executive decisions all day long without nearly as much concern about how changing course will trickle down through the project.
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