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 was the sole developer for a very simple web app with no back end component. The other person who worked on it was the UX person. We both spent 6 months making it so that’s roughly 100k right there. That doesn’t include the 10 other people involved who were users expressing what they needed, testers, project managers, the HR people who got us there, … More complex apps would take much longer, might involve back end people, … Development is expensive as hell.
If you’re talking about the ArriveCAN app – there’s a load of corruption in the way of bloated hours billed by the development company. Unnecessary travel to “gather requirements”, “high level designs” created again and again, extremely senior folks billing hours for no reason and maybe even charging an unreasonably high fee because the data stored is PIi or confidential. There’s many things at play that could easily bloat up the cost from let’s say $500K to $5MM.
When you spend $200,000 a year (including their benefits, office space, and computing hardware needed to develop your app) on 5 developers for 3 years to develop something, the total cost is $3 million.
The fully burdened cost (salary plus fringe plus profit/fee) for a software developer in northern Virginia is a little over $300,000 (basically double the salary). For planning, assume 3 developers for $1M a year. This doesn’t include their management, contracts, legal, security, testing, etc. Government apps require lengthy approvals like for security and usability. Also they aren’t really “apps” like on your phone. They have connections to dozens of other services that all have to be designed and tested. They also need 24/7 support and they have to work all the time if they are mission critical. So a small “app” costs about $60M to develop and a big one is $500M and up.
OP, you probably gave the worst example of a client having an app made – the government.
Yes, you can make an app on the cheap cheap by DIY’ing it or doing it with a buddy. Or you can have a team/army of people working on it and it’ll cost a fortune.
But any time you introduce the government in to something, they’ll over-promise, over-spend, and under-perform. Every. Single. Time.
Apps can run the range from a button that turns on your phones flash light to complex things that integrate into multiple databases, and may need their own database set up. If you have a full time employee that makes $150,000 a year, you probably are paying at least $210,000 if not up to $250,000 in terms of payroll taxes, benefits, IT costs (having a phone line, email account, computer, etc), and other things. If you have a designer, developer, DBA, and an extra person working for a year, you’re already getting close to $1mil. If you bring in some consultants, run user test groups, or have to stand up some servers, etc. hitting $1mil is not that hard. If they factor in maintaining the app over the course of a couple years, the cost can go up further (yeah you might not need a full time staff the size you needed to roll it out but if you want the app to last 5 years you need to budget some people’s time for maintenance.
Worked on a project that was about $4mil. A large part of that is it was expected to last 10 years and we budgeted to have staff and equipment support it for a decade.
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