@thomasmeagher Hey Tom! Great point. This is something we're working on.
How would you imagine it working to be most helpful for you? Like you could insert your hourly rate and that switches up the cost to build each feature?
Thanks again for the input.
@mikaelcho Hourly rate factoring into cost per feature is an interesting idea.
It would be useful to have a total estimated hours at the end along with the cost. Obviously would have to be a range, but it helps put the cost into context. The question after how much does this cost is usually how long will it take.
@mikaelcho@thomasmeagher
Is the target for this a potential customer looking to get a developer/designer? Or for freelancers to put together estimates?
Seems a tad weird to me that you would need both an estimate of $ and time, just time makes a lot more sense since all developers and designers are going to charge different rates.
@thomasmeagher personally, I'd stay away from this. A few reasons:
1. If you're developer estimating a large-ish ($5k+) job, I would never quote in hours (days are better). No reputable, working app gets built in hours.
2. During an initial quoting/estimation process, we developers are always overconfident. The hours are inevitably going to be off.
3. Some developers are quicker than others. Want to write a login page? Great, I can do that in Ruby and the devise gem in a few hours. A Lisp developer might do this in 2 days. (please don't turn this into a discussion about why you would never use Lisp to do this...etc)
The only value of cost calculators is for framing, not for planning. Right now, everyone's frame of reference for the cost of an app is that "Mark Zuckerberg built FB in a weekend in his dormroom". This notion is extremely dangerous because it doesn't value developer's time and compensation.
@mbesto Completely agree. The real-world development process is highly variable and this model does not capture everything.
Thought hours would be an interesting addition because it can be converted to days, applied to an hourly rate, etc.
Meesho
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