Denis Wittman: how much does it cost to create an application or the whole truth about money
In November, we published the first two parts of the article “How to become a millionaire in the App Store?” Denis Wittman from the company “Erd”. Today we are publishing the third part, which originally appeared on Habr.
After learning that I am developing mobile applications, my friends from time to time ask: “how much does it cost to develop an application?”. And I honestly answer: “from $ 200.” The application will write HELLO WORLD on the screen, it will not be allowed into the store because of the “bad user experience”, but the application will work!
The most amazing thing is that a huge number of developers really create something for $ 3,000 and even upload it to the App Store.
Some of the stories of Russian developers are strikingly reminiscent of a wandering fairy tale story “about a magic assistant”: in the spirit of a humpback skate or a goldfish. Designers and composers appear out of nowhere and create exciting things for free, and programmers with the humility of Cinderella scribble initially brilliant code at night…
I just want to look into their eyes and ask them in a heartfelt way:
— Guys, what fairy tale are you from?
Otherwise, in my harsh reality, the development of a high–quality, albeit small, Appstore application is long, difficult and expensive.
The main items of expenditure when creating a project:
The whole layout will be done using the example of our application “My Emotions”. The application is free, all the functionality can be viewed.
When designing the application, we set the task to create a “tool” that, when used correctly, allows a person to consult with his subconscious and receive an adequate and accurate answer from him.
But back to our budgets.
“Adequate” market prices are given for all items of expenditure. That is, the prices for which you can hire a competent specialist or outsourcing company. Obviously, you can find a person for pizza and beer, but this is not a professional approach. So you can make one application, but not build a studio.
Application design – $ 13,000
- Designer (for games – game designer) – $ 20 per hour
- Art Director – $30 per hour
- Project Manager – $15 per hour (part-time)
Before you start working on a project, you need to come up with it. We will need: a general concept of the project, an art bible defining the style of the project, sketches, examples of content, a diagram of screens and a description of the main technologies. The more invented in the beginning, the faster and easier it is to do later.
The saddest thing is trying to save money at this stage. We spent too little time on this work and then paid for too significant alterations.
For ourselves, we have developed a principle – at the design stage, we must make documents so that the project can be outsourced and be sure that everything will be done as it should.
5 weeks, 40 hours, $ 65 per hour (cumulatively) and now the first $ 13,000 has flowed out of the project budget.
Graphics production – $ 35,000
- 2D artist – $20 per hour
- 3D modeler, animator – $25 per hour
From the point of view of an ordinary person, artists do not just work slowly, they work delightfully slowly. Moreover, most of this work takes place either in their heads, or in small changes in color, shape and angle that are completely invisible to an unprepared person. This leads to the fact that a full-size, full-color drawing with a decent level of detail requires two full working days.
No, a separate drawing can be made in a day. But if you need to make them, as in our project, then don’t even hope. 2 days is the minimum. At the same time, some of the pictures will not fit and they will have to be redone. Sad arithmetic – 20 hours per picture, $ 20 per hour, 62 pictures in the app – and, voilà, we just spent 25 thousand dollars.
We didn’t have a lot of 3D and animation – doors open, elevators go, mirrors turn. There are 5 independent scenes in total. It took 210 hours for modeling, skinning and other 3D-shny bells and whistles.
Another 250 hours of time was consumed by the rendering of all application screens. If they ask me what they’ve been painting there for so long, I won’t be able to answer. But I know for sure – it couldn’t have been much faster – no one was freeloading and everyone was working at full strength.
Programming – $45,000
- Senior programmer – $35 per hour
I noticed a strange pattern – if you ask a programmer how long it will take to create a “visible” product in terms of its size, the answer is always the same – 2-3 months. It seems that the projects are different and platforms and languages – but still 2-3 months.
It’s even more strange that it’s true. In two months, you will have an almost working prototype of your application on your hands. It will be impossible to use it, but most of the functionality will be present.
And time after time, in different projects, it turns out that bringing the functionality to mind requires 3-4 times more time than prototyping, which the programmer’s ego cleverly passes off as a finished product.
In our project, we had to throw out the prototype created on the Cocos2D engine, since the cheap pseudo-3D that we wanted to use looked miserable and writhed like a half-dead cockroach under the user’s fingers, instead of fluttering like a butterfly and flowing like silk.
In fact, programming before almost release took 8 months and cost $ 45,000
Creating uniqueness – $ 10,000
There are more apps in the modern AppStore than there are residents in Irkutsk. And this means that just a regular application will not interest anyone – neither buyers, nor journalists, nor Apple itself. There must be something in the application that really distinguishes it from the rest. It can be unusual physics, unique gameplay, special speech recognition technology or psychedelic art style. But whatever it is, it will take time and, therefore, money.
In our application, scientific psychology has become such a uniqueness (as opposed to the popular one in women’s magazines). To obtain the primary data, we conducted a large-scale study in which more than 500 people from several dozen countries took part. We had to pay for the creation of the methodology, and for attracting people to the study, for statistical processing and for scientific expertise from the Faculty of Psychology of St. Petersburg State University, for a review of the literature on the topic (yes, having scientific degrees in psychology, we still ordered literature reviews on a given topic to be completely confident in ourselves).
As a result, we received a projective technique that works on a mobile device and provides more than 75% accuracy in diagnosing a person’s emotional state. Lusher with his test nervously smokes on the sidelines.
The total budget for the development of “psychomechanics”, as we called the scientific side of our application, was $ 10,000.
Creating text content – $ 5,000
The application requires depth. Otherwise, the user will have “nothing” to use in it. In the navigator there are maps, in angry birds there are levels, in our application there are 5 different use cases and 62 possible results. When multiplied, they give 310 different interpretations of the result. 310 moderately short, meaningful, meaningful, beautiful and literate texts.
That’s a hell of a lot–it’s a whole novel consisting of only short chapters. Our texts were written jointly by a team of psychologists and science fiction writer Svyatoslav Loginov.
Localization – $ 3,000
- 15-25 cents per word
The Russian market is small. For a product with a price of several dollars, it is not very easy to earn on the Russian market, for this you need to initially create something that everyone will like, but at the same time it is sharpened specifically for Russians.
The global market is 50 times bigger. But in order to do something for him, you need to speak the language of the client. Each text must be translated by a professional translator and proofread by a native speaker with the right education and experience. We have localized our product (70,000 characters) into English and French. It ate up a lot of time, nerves and $3,000 (and yes, it was very inexpensive).
Sound and music – $ 1000
The entrance to the building where our office is located is closed by a grid with a combination lock. This lock has a unique feature – when you press the buttons and open the door, no sound is made. And although the code works, in half of the cases I have to meet guests who, having pressed the buttons, did not realize that the door was open.
In the application, almost any user action must be voiced. 43 different actions – and each has its own sound. And there should also be music. And it should reflect the atmosphere of the application, and in a good way it should grow out of the pants of MIDI files of the early 90s and sound like orchestral polyphony. Some time ago I bought the Bastion game only because of the amazing music – especially since the game is not much more expensive than the album.
We were lucky — the music and sounds were written to us “out of friendship” by Alexander Dmitriev, who voices projects for Rovio and Mountain Sheep. There are 20 minutes of music written especially for us in our modest application. We paid a meager $1,000 for everything.
The musical theme of anger
Polishing – $ 17,000
Polishing is such a nasty process when almost nothing changes in the application and everyone is busy at the same time. Move it there, fix it here, reformat it a little here, the behavior is not obvious here, and then the application suddenly hung up.
It took a month and a half to polish – the work of an artist, a programmer and a project manager. And even now the project is full of rough edges that catch the eye of professionals of all stripes. 6 weeks, $ 20 for an artist, $ 35 for a programmer, $ 15 for a manager (he, thank God, is not on the same project) – and here we say goodbye to $ 17,000.
Marketing – $ 30,000
The previous two parts of the article are written about marketing:
How to become a millionaire in the AppStore or some formulas about promotion and sales. Part 1
and
How to become a millionaire in the AppStore or some formulas about promotion and sales. Part 2
We spent about $10,000 on research and experiments. We made a successful exit in the Russian AppStore, getting 3rd place in the category and 40 in the overall rating. But they flew away so quickly that we had to study how the market works and what’s wrong with us.
We changed the name and icon. The number of downloads has increased 10 times. In order to go to the USA and around the world, 50,000 would be needed. But we’ll lay 30,000.
Management – $ 30,000
- Project manager – $ 15 per hour
And the last thing — all this process has to be managed. Even in a small project, more than 10 people are employed, their work needs to be coordinated, we need to keep in one head what is happening and what result we want to get in the end. It is necessary to look at what has turned out and resolve contradictions. In general, you have to spend money on a person who does not create a single byte in the application during the entire project. With a total development period of a year – simple arithmetic begins to resemble a series of horror films – $ 15, for 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks a year – for that kind of money you can buy a new decent car…
The final
Yes, it could have been done cheaper.
It could even be done much cheaper.
It was possible to save on many things, not to do some of them at all.
But was it worth starting to make a tasteless craft? I do not know any secret of success, but I know for sure that you need to do something that you will be proud of yourself.
