In the previous blog post, we made a research on the average cost of a developer’s working hours worldwide, and revealed, that location affects the cost much more than other factors.
This means, that with other things being equal, the quality in Indonesia will be just a bit lower than in the USA, while the price will vary 10 times. Or 8 times, if we are talking about the Ukrainian average.
In this post, we’ll discuss for a feature set, especially custom features affect an application cost.
To make it simple let’s divide all features on standard ones – which we have in 80-90% of applications, and custom ones.
So, standard features include:
- Login
- Profile
- Search
- Chat
- Push notifications
- Payment model
- Admin panel
- User management
- Geolocation and maps
- Booking system
And here is what they usually take in coding hours:
More complex, partly customized features, which we often see in apps are:
- In-app calls
- In-app postponed transactions and service fees
- Video streaming
- Match-making system
- Offline capabilities
- Rating systems
- Online-support
- Image recognition
This list of features often uses some box solutions or libraries that need to be customized specifically for the need of a particular product. So, this means a lot of server-side work. In this case, the gap between an optimistic, realistic and pessimistic estimate in hours is significant:
But what about the things that make an application unique? A killer feature or a custom business model that makes a product stand out of the crowd?
Here are several examples:
- Custom mobile video editor
- Smart contract-based payment logic
- Advanced booking systems
- Big data collected from a firmware
- ML
- AI
- Advanced data encryption
Here is the trick. Such complex killer features have no end in coding. You can always add, improve or optimize something, so it simply does not make sense to state a fixed number of hours in this case.