[esrauch]

It's really not realistic to say that facebook could make it for $100k; even entry level developers at facebook make more than $100k salary yearly which means they each cost the company significantly more than that including benefits, office space, hardware, etc. Even if they took 2 developers, half a PM and half a UX person on this for only one quarter it would cost way more than that.

[droithomme]

Of the 13 people, two are founders, two are engineers, two are developers, the rest are customer service reps.

Of the four engineer/developers, only one of them wasn't hired in the last few months. One of them was hired two weeks ago, one in January, another in December.

So only one developer is responsible for the app and all the servers, the others haven't hardly had time to get up to speed.

Not surprising, the iOS version is trivial since CoreImage' image processing library provides all the filters and image processing. Doing the port to Android was the hard part, although most likely they just licensed an image processing library from someone, or extracted it from GIMP's open code.

I think it is realistic to say the cost of developing the iOS version, which is what most of their 30 million customers are using, was well under $100,000.

[esrauch]

First of all you are talking about Instagram and I am talking about facebook. If some random students made Instagram who were otherwise making minimum wage it's not like you can claim Facebook should be able to make it for <$1000. Also, it isn't just the app that we are talking about but the server and all associated infrastructure.

But secondly, I'm not sure how you went from 13 people to 3, lets assume we we accept that we are only talking about the 3 people. Even if those 3 people are making only $50k yearly salary, working on this for 6 months is already costing Instagram well over $100k once you take into account office space, benefits and hardware.