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 work in software and often have to answer why things cost what they do.
The analogy I often use for a do you need a go-kart or do you need a car?
If you just need to get from a to b a go kart will get that job done. But it’ll be bumpy, possibly break down and will be dangerous on the roads.
A car will also get you from a to b, and probably no faster than a go kart. A car though will be more reliable, more comfortable and you can trust it to transport your family.
If you want a go kart equivalent of an app, you can go to fiverr and maybe get something decent made for 10k.
If you want a car equivalent you’ll need a full product team working 6-12 months on it. That will easily get you to a million.
Something that Noone talked about is scalability and security.
It’s extremely expensive to create the tech correctly. Also extremely hard.
because the specifications were vague or terrible and the contractors took advantage to milk that sweet tax money dry
Your not thinking of the thousands of many hours it takes to create an application from scratch. You need multiple developers that all make over 100k per year.
It’s needs to be marketed/sold
You need a legal dept, accounting etc
You need an office to work in as well.
If it takes a year to build from scratch and it’s the first app this company has made its going to cost a lot of money or take ridiculous long to finish.
Plus when you say ‘app’ you are only talking about the part of the IT solution that is visible to the user. If you are developing anything other than a mobile game chances are high that the server-side part of the work is bigger than purely the app part.
There’s a lot of excuses here, but the truth is, no one knows how to properly make things anymore.
10 developers each getting paid 100,000 for a year is $1,000,000 and that is just direct labor. Lots of indirect labor and costs exists too.
Instagram has over 300 developers. Imagine how much their app costs…
Easy, depending on the size of the app.
I worked in a company where we did a full rewrite of the front-end and middleware layer plus a bunch of new backend stuff and a translation layer for COBOL to java. Licencing was often hundreds of thousands to millions a year.
That project went for about 3 years, with up to 100 Devs and product people at times, all pulling close to 100k on average (this is a while ago now). That’s like 30-40 million just for the Dev/product salaries.
Aside from all the other answers around how much development costs actually are, government contracts also involve a ton of red tape and political management. So you need a whole team of people dealing with that side of it. Plus development is going to take longer both in terms of finalising the requirements and proving that the final.product meets them.
Well, lets say you have 10 people working on it for 1 year at an average salary of $80k per year. Thats $800k right there.
Then add in overhead like office and utilities and software to develop game etc. easy to accumulate $200k in overhead expenses.
That doesn’t even factor in any production/distribution costs once the game is developed.
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