[smokel]

At one end of the spectrum, some people here claim to write this kind of software over a weekend. Some others claim they require a salary of $600,000, and still need nine additional colleagues to pull something like this off.

There is a lot of room in between, where cost estimates are more realistic.

[renegade-otter]

Plenty of things can be prototyped over a weekend, but many will require months and even years to get production-ready, feature-complete, and useful, especially at scale.

[szundi]

This answer pretty much sums a lot of my experience. Of course when the guy somehow pulls this off in 2 weeks it is seen as an easy side project with proof that it is, haha

[datadrivenangel]

This is why incentives favor the heavy bloated enterprise approach: if it looks expensive, people feel like they got something good for their money.