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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Software developers are expensive.
Like around $60k for newbies and $100+k for experienced ones.
Like for a team of around 15 people you are looking at a million a year in salaries alone and that’s a relatively small dev team.
I’ve personally spent that developing an app.
Firstly, developer salaries are huge, with capable experienced developers earning far over $100k. Put a couple people on fronted, a tester, someone doing documentation, a backend developer, a data person, and a project manager. Odds are your annual staff cost will be over $1m.
I don’t know how long you expect the project to last, but you’ll be surprised how little you can get done in a year, especially if you have to co-ordinate with other teams.
I mean yes, a single developer working from their basement can do much the same thing in a couple months. The difference between much the same and finished is a truly massive amount of work.
Governments dont move quickly. Before a dev even sees a scoping documents there had been a strategy documented and approved, customer voice / journey mapping exercise completed, focus groups, and hours of internal collaborative sessions to ensure every voice is heard. Guaranteed Gary will bring up that 0.002% scenario that won’t be able to be addressed. Noone will tell Gary to STFU or they get dragged to HR for bullying and harrassment. The external consultants driving the ship don’t mind if it runs over timeframes because their contract gets extended.
Then you go through the procurement process which means drafting up a scoping document, requirements, etc and getting the required approvals. Keep in mind, this process will be needlessly complicated because the people in the procurement team need to stay relevant/employed. Tendors from vendors/developers will need to be reviewed and scored with a clear document trail as to why company A was chosen over B.
You’re now 18 months into the project and budgets have been reallocated. So kickstart those conversations, which means business cases being drafted, documented, proofed, approved, etc.
Then the dev comes onto the scene.
I have lived this dream and am baffled by how slowly anything happens, and how some people are happy for the project to drag as long as possible.
I had a pitch last week for a augmented reallity project for gov responsible for education. The guy in charge told me money was so little because be he already spent 13 million euro of his funding on an AI driven content and crm platform for next year. The scope is so massive that 13M feels like it would quickly drain out.
Building the app is one thing but there’s all sorts of expensive market research, user testing, marketing etc. on top
Specialist’s salarie X number of employees X number of months + operational costs + marketing + taxes
I remember speaking to a friend about a project I was working on, for an e-commerce website, which cost about 500k.
He was all surprised that a “stupid website” could ever cost so much. I then went on to explain we were just improving the shopping basket experience 🙂
Also, you can hire several cheap developers for the cost of one experienced developer, so it’s not uncommon for companies/governments to go with the cheaper option to save on costs only to find that the time to deliver blows out and ends up costing more.
Or nepotism, and you end up with a project manager or lead developer who is shit, slows everything down or causes the people who know what their doing to leave.
Desiding what the app will do is the easy part. Implementing it is difficult.
You could’t know how hard it is to make machines to do complex things correctly by writing down sequences of simple instructions. You’d have to learn about software development.
It takes a lot of time. You start with small and simple thing. And then repeatedly change it and test it. And there probably dozens of people doing that, and then working on making their parts work together.
The difficult part is having dozens of workplaces maintained, with rent and bills; paying dozens of higjly skilled developers, testers, sysadmins. Plus, today having an app meaning running the server side software at your premises, or in cloud. That’s another electricity bill, rent bill, hardware capex, cloud bill etc..
And you gonna pay those bills for as long as it takes – could be years.
An “app” is just a piece of software (a program your computer can run). Videogames are apps. if you think about how a lot of videogame people are saying “making games is expensive”, the reason is that the tech itself is expensive, and the people making use of or developing new tech to create the game won’t work for free. For government apps, imagine that kind of development, BUT the end result is not intended to be sold to the general public (most of the time). If that’s the case, the cost will have to be recouped some other way.
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