You've lost any argument as soon as you use the words "trust me", because in this case, your comments carry very little weight. I've been a project manager on 25+ million pound projects and I regularly commission work for my new company and frankly, while we don't know the scope of this project, the coding alone, along with testing, design and all the games would take a studio of developers several months. I'm not sure in what land you do your coding but developing a complex app from the ground up is NOT a simple two day process. LOL. The artwork for my last project cost £5000 - but I'm sure you'd feel that could be done for £20 (if I know where to look)

I think 100k is a reasonable figure for what she wants to achieve. Sure, it could be done cheaper, but it sounds like she wants a deeply interactive app. Depending on the scope, you could be looking at 200 or even much more. But then I wouldn't be asking you for a quote and, I presume, neither would Vana.

And then you're paying for a studio, reputation, which gives you a level of confidence which isn't there with smaller companies. You might be able to cut corners but a major project is looking for some serious assurances which you working on your own in your bedroom, couldn't offer.


Again, I've no idea why you're making assumptions about me. I'm quite aware of the need for a VPS. I only made mention of the need for a huge advertising budget.

In summary: while we don't know the scope of this project, from what Vana has said, it looks to be more than just a few pictures on the Internet. The whole matching system is a complex little beastie - there's more here than meets the eye.

I'd imagine a few people with the relevant skills could knock up a reasonable approximation of the idea in a few days but the devil with this is in the detail, Was this filmed before the Ashley Madison leak so suddenly penetration testing (ooh err missus) could be a very regular and costly expense to a small budget to ensure the clients feel secure in giving up their details.

and the biggest hurdle is to get the people to actually sign up and enter their card details which is where most of the budget really is going to go..but didn't one of the previous winners have a digital marketing company so perhaps a mates rates for their help might work a bit.

I've found people who deal with pricy projects often think everything is pricy. Vana's Dating App isn't going to be a weekend project. It's also not a block-buster. I would budget around six months and £ 100k at most.

I'm not that concerned that people think Apps are so expensive. More money for me. If you want to believe salespeople then that's up to you.

But I've been on the inside track of some apps that have made a lot of cash. And they didn't cost much to produce.

Ordinarily, probably not.
But launching it to millions of potential customers on a TV show might help.

I've never understood why they don't mention this large scale free advertising during the interviews.

Exactly this. Stormwave is being disingenuous at best; it doesn't matter how good he/she is at what they do, if they're actually an experienced engineer they know full well that anything they've knocked together in 2 days is basically a pile of crap that has no monetary value and doesn't adhere to any professional practices. It's just not possible for anything non-trivial.

A real-world, large scale production system is much more than a bit of code hacked together in a bedroom. I very much doubt their "fully developed game" had distributed multi player capability, full unit test coverage, functional tests, end-to-end user tests, technical and user documentation, custom developed artwork and audio, appropriately commercial-use licensed components that make the delivered product their exclusive intellectual property, performance benchmarking and load testing, an architecture planned and engineered for scale-out, security auditing/penetration testing and a bunch of other things I can't even be bothered to think of right now. And a large scale dating app will need all of those things if it's to get to the point that it's got so many thousands of users that it's turning over multi-million pound revenue.

I've worked for and with companies that will charge £15k just for a relatively small site built on top of Wordpress. Hundreds of thousands of pounds that's gone in to software that was given away for free, open source, just to gain market traction before any commercial offering was developed and any revenue generated. Quality bespoke software is very, very expensive and time-consuming, and I'm sceptical of the level of experience of anyone who claims otherwise. Sure, you can build a poor quality proof-of-concept, limited feature, small scale prototype of something like Vana's idea on the cheap, but all that will happen is you have to rebuild the entire thing from scratch, the right way, later down the line. It's possible that by that point her POC will be sufficient to raise more capital investment, but if the business is to experience the kind of exponential growth she's projecting and relying on, a bedroom job on the software isn't going to cut it by a long margin.

^^ Agree if it was that easy to knock up, everyone would be doing it. Look at some of the Silicon Valley billionaires. A lot of their founders are also the coders/developers(e.g. Mark Zuckerberg). They still needed funding in order to keep up with the pace of growth. If they could do it on their own, why would they dilute their share and let outside investors in?

Without seeing the scope I think that's definitely in the ballpark


Well this is true. Look at Flappy Bird.

BUT there's a world - nay - a universe - of difference between Flappy Bird and what Vana wants to do.

I imagine they'd focus on the big cities. That said, operating in Australia at all would be a cost. You'd need contacts there, and managing them would be a problem. Likewise other countries. It's intrinsically international and that sounds expensive and hard.

Wow, the crazy justification here for high price tech development is insane.

£15k for a Wordpress site is an absolute rip off, and to use that as a justified price for higher prices is insane. I could easily develop a Wordpress website in a week. £15k for a weeks work would be pretty nice, but I have morals, and I would only charge a weeks worth of work. Too many people think that that is an acceptable going rate for a weeks work on a crappy website. Too many people try and justify the prices to line their own pockets.

Anyway, I'll go back to my little niche of satisfied clients, good wage and great hours. You project managers can fight over the "big funded projects" whilst us developers go back to the fun coding stuff. There is a reason most open source projects outshine their paid counterparts.

I've witnessed first hand the failure of so many high investment projects, where money has just been thrown at it, and nothing is completed. That is not because of development costs, but absolutely horrific management and ridiculously high wages.

So many people in the tech world are wealthy, but that is not because their work is worth that amount, but because they feel justified in charging that much.

No offence, but you can only comment on the front-end coding, since you have no idea how the back end is coded.


Therein lies the problem. The sales people make the sale, without knowing anything of the development. And people like you are happy to take the excessive money. I don't feel ethical extorting clients.

The problem with any costs is it depends what the customer wants, if they want a world class photographer and the models wearing designer suits for the photo shoot then its going to cost so while 15k for a bog standard WP site is nuts but if 12k+ of that is on the photography then suddenly its not as bad as it seems

and if the customers happy to sign off on it you never argue with them

True, but I would always recommend a client to not spend that much money unless they truly believe it's worth it. I have a moral obligation to advise them correctly. But sure, if the client is an absolute idiot and insists, then I can't stop them. Many people would encourage them to increase their spending, often claiming it's necessary when it really isn't.

However if we're talking pure development costs, then 15k is ludicrous. I can't see many outlying costs for Vana's project however.

Except when we charge £15k for a site built on top of Wordpress, we're not building a crappy site (well, not beyond the extent to which Wordpress itself is arguably a crappy platform), we're building a good, professional site and probably including some considerable branding and UX work that makes the ROI on the £15k more than worth it (I don't work in web development anymore, so "we" in this context is not me).


As I said, many large and successful open source projects actually have multi-million dollar funding behind them. If coding for you is about "fun", you're more likely to be a bedroom hobby coder who maybe charges people a few hundred quid here and there for a poor quality*, quickly knocked together website. And that's fine, but it's not representative of the practices we employ for large scale, commercial applications.

*Poor quality does not necessarily mean broken (although from a professional standpoint I would argue that any code that doesn't have test coverage is already broken by definition), or badly designed / "tacky looking", rather that it has not been built in accordance with the principles surrounding proper systems analysis and design, nor has it had any real of measure of branding, UX or custom development done on it. I have myself quickly chucked together basic Wordpress sites for people in a weekend for a few hundred quid for small business clients whose sites will probably never get more than 100 unique visitors in a day, or more than a dozen concurrent connections, but at least I'm happy to admit that those clients got what they paid for - a hack job done in my bedroom in sixteen hours, usually based on some existing template or boilerplate code and ready-made free plugins for the platform.

I dislike you claiming my work is poor quality simply because I don't extort my clients. £15k is never justified for pure development costs on a WordPress site (I used the term crappy, because anything based on WP is inherently bad). I am also not a hobby coder but a professional programmer, I just enjoy my work.

I pride myself on high quality work at fair prices. A practice that is very rare in the IT world.

We can agree to disagree on pricing, but your attacks on the quality of my work are very offensive and presumptuous. I would ask you to apologise for that assumption and we can end our disagreement here.

I added some text to clarify what I meant by "poor quality", but it was an edit and you presumably replied before I'd made it. Quality has a particular meaning to me within software, because I come from a TDD background and incorporates all the auxiliary points I made a few posts up about the kind of stuff needs to be considered and developed for what I refer to as "quality software".

Given that they have user-facing unchecked exceptions I don't have high hopes for the backend. There's not going to much backend code anyway.

hey it could be worse....remember the early says when urls contained full sql instructions and a view source would reveal passwords....oh those halcyon days of changing prices then posting to some site that a product was only 1/10th of the price and sitting back and enjoying the fun

Even in your edit, there is a strong implication that this is my practice. I am asking for an apology for your presumption that because I charge a fair price in a short time frame, it means my products are poor quality, regardless of what you subjectively class as poor quality. I don't appreciate defamation.

The irony is most large scale projects that go through these processes you're projecting are normally absolutely terrible. Just look at the NHS IT systems.

Good old SQL insertion. I miss those days.

I feel very confident in predicting that any product you, or any other programmer in the world, produces solo from start to finish in the space of two days is either trivial or of a poor quality as quality would be understood in an Agile framework and I make no apology for saying that.

I have made no factual statements or claims about any piece of work you've ever produced, for the obvious reason that I have not ever seen any of your work. If it makes you feel better, I am happy to clarify for all readers: I have absolutely no idea how good or bad of a programmer, web designer or systems architect you are, or what practices you employ in your work.

Actually, as I worked on some of those I am uniquely qualified to discuss this subject. Most of the cost goes on the fact that the client doesn't know exactly what it wants and spends tens (if not more) on scope changes. If you only knew how much money was wasted on ill conceived projects... ICK. And worse, projects that take a 180 in direction - that's why they're so expensive, but again, when you're custom designing software...

However, how this got onto Wordpress sites is a bit weird. Vana wouldn't want an off the shelf package, she'd need something built from the ground up. Well that's what I imagine she'd want anyway.

Looks like I was vindicated by the developers in the final who agreed that an app like Vana was proposing can easily end up costing a few hundred thousand and need a lot of time and cash before it can even begin to be monetised. Though maybe if she'd asked for a quote on this forum, she could've got it fully developed to a quality, scalable, production ready standard in a weekend for a hundred quid

Apart from a few buzzwords, Joseph doesn't know what he is getting into. Eg What does he know about putting solar panels on a roof?

Vana was stuck with a concept whose funding flaws could never be overcome.

Allowing such radical changes to the business plans makes the interview stage rather pointless. Fairness would say that they all should be allowed to submit different plans.