| I am not a developer but I have dabbled in the past and I consider myself fairly technical and web savvy. I have an interesting idea for a small web app and I am considering options for implementing it. So I would like to ask the HN community how you o glorious hackers would advise me to implement such a lowly app as the one (sort of) described briefly below. Features:
1. A main page that allows the user to upload as many images as they want. Kind of like selecting multiple files to attach to an email.
2. The user should be required to enter an email address.
3. The site will charge per image so needs checkout facilities including taking shipping details and postage charging etc.
4. At checkout the user should have the option to:
4.1. Save their shipping address for use next time (in other words sign-up). Otherwise, the user should not need to sign-up to use the service. If they do choose to sign-up, they will need to provide a password - ideally without going to a separate page.
4.2. Have their images stored for future use and shared with their Facebook friends. This would require d user to enter their Facebook username (email) or state that it is the same as the email address already entered above.
5. Ideally, all of the above functionality should be on a single page.
6. A My Images page for registered users.
7. A Tell a Friend page and associated form.
8. An About Us page. Without giving the idea away, the closest thing I can liken this to is one of those websites to which you can upload your photos and have them printed and sent to you. As a non-developer on a very tight budget, below are the implementation options that I can see for now:
1. Buy/clone one of said photo-printing services, modify it and for the Facebook functionality, integrate/mashup the site up with Facebook Connect, Gigya’s Socialize or WidgetBox’s AppAccelerator.
2. Use one of the many easy website builders out there like Weebly or Synthasite, mashed-up with form-builder Wufoo and do the same as above for the Facebook bits.
3. Pay someone to build the site from scratch and integrate with Facebook as above.
4. Pay someone to build it as a Facebook app directly. So what do you think? Which of the options are viable/best, how much would you charge a customer for option 3 or 4 above? |
If you want real ballpark to start the thinking process (can't really promise much more than that without a lot more information) - well I'd say that a local 2-3 man shop might quote around $25k on this (i.e. ~4 weeks work).
Course, people will tell you that this is 1 week's work, or 2 days, or whatever, but generally this will be coming a developer, and they'll only quote the development time.
This cost will vary greatly depending on location (e.g. India vs Bay Area vs elsewhere). You could look at going somewhere like India, China or the former Eastern Block for development - the daily rate will be lower, but I suspect the overheads will swamp you, particularly for a one-off piece of work.
The approach will make a big difference too - I suspect you'd find if you tweaked certain requirements something like Google Checkout could provide a lot.
If you wanted to build something to demonstration level only, then probably half that.
A larger professional development shop could easily quote 50-100k. They'll want to do requirements, testing, etc, etc.
If I was building this in/for a corporate environment with all the trimmings, then I'd push this ballpack up to 100-200k. (You don't really get "Hello World" in this environment for less than 100k - but it'll be tested to the n'th degree, scalable, fault tolerant, etc, etc).
There are other costs as well, perhaps more significant and something to be aware of.
1. How much interface/web design do you want to put into the product? You can spend very little through to astronomical amounts on the design.
2. If you're handling images, potentially large ones, then you're going to have a much higher bandwidth and storage requirements than many web apps.
2B. If you need to scale (i.e. X new users every day) the you'll need to accommodate that. Even if you're not paying for the capacity, building in the ability to scale can be expensive. This could be anything from using a top-tier host, or investing a lot more in development and performance testing.
3. You might need other things like domains, secure certificates, company formation fees, legal fees (disclaimers, etc). You might (and I usually recommend) want a good copywriter. These things are usually pretty manageable in themselves, but add up really quickly.