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Comment by allsystemsgo | Hacker News Reader

$50.00 an hour? What?

Instagram is incredibly polished. Notice how fast it is? As you're selecting an image, they're already uploading it to their servers. That is critical to maintaining and growing their user base. I go to Instagram knowing I can upload a nice looking photo quickly. The images load incredibly fast as well. Its simplicity is deceptively robust.

This is not recreated by a developer billing at $50.00 an hour.

So, if you're looking to have an app built, and you're reading this post, just know it's pretty inaccurate. You get what you pay for.

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I agree with you that $50 is stupidly low. I also agree with you that the estimates are laughable for making an actual copy of Instagram.

BUTTTTTTT. They are very clear in the article about calling it an MVP of something like Instagram. It's the difference between making the Twitter-like app in a tutorial and making Twitter.

This is a pretty good example of someone making an estimate for an MVP level contract app. Obviously it's what they do for a living so that's not surprising. I think it's a good reference for anyone else trying to spec something. If you aren't at this level of detail, you don't have enough detail.

The big problem with a spec like this is that the app you will get is not going to be anywhere near the level of quality of an app like Instagram. You have to set customer expectations or you will spend a huge amount of time litigating whether or not the app is 'done'.

> The big problem with a spec like this is that the app you will get is not going to be anywhere near the level of quality of an app like Instagram. You have to set customer expectations or you will spend a huge amount of time litigating whether or not the app is 'done'.

This. In my experience of building apps under contract, the concept of the MVP is not very well understood outside of our tech industry echo chamber. We regularly have clients who know the term and "want an MVP" but when it comes down to release act completely contrarily (mostly trying to delay releases for additional features, more polish, etc). Client education and carefully setting expectations are key in this line of work.

This estimate also complete ignores billable time for project management and testing.

Edit: And design, if you want your app to look even remotely different from Instagram. And devops to stand it up in a scalable way. And maintenance / service agreements to keep the thing running...

Contract iOS engineer here, based out of Colorado. My company bills $150-$200/hour for my time.

> Its simplicity is deceptively robust.

I've met some of the Instagram iOS team. Part of the beautiful simplicity comes from the fact that FB can afford to pay ~5-7 iOS engineers top salary to work on improving the app full time. And that's just the iOS app.

And if you were in the SFBA, it'd be ++$50/hr on top of that.

What could you expect as a freelancing contractor? Assuming you've previously done mobile work at a Facebook/Google/Apple/Microsoft tier company.

Yes, but they were good even before being bought by FB

And as the product matures the develop-test-deploy cycle gets slower

It is 2016. Development work is pretty much copy and paste instead of rocket science. Based on this article http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over-snapch..., the whole app ecosystem is dying, and less and less people are going to explore new apps. In the short future, people will stop paying the insane amount of money to developers to build the apps nobody is using.

> Development work is pretty much copy and paste

You don't create software, do you?

For app development, the hard part has already been done through well-written lib, and the developers mainly write some trivial business logic to put these components together.

Nope, you definitely do not create software.

You do not think of this way because you do not write modular code. How hard to use a react component in a application?

When instagram is made there was no library of making actual logic. You should not rely on libraries if you want to make instagram you should rely on people who can make that kind of libraries

I would hope you're not developing, much less shipping software that relies on you copying and pasting.

I would be "impressed" with your productivity if you write an authentication, message and notification system from scratch over twice, and each time takes over 40 hours.

I think you missed the point of the post which is not what it'd cost to build Instagram, but to build a MVP camera/album + backend, similar to the basic functionality that Instagram offers, without the level of polish.

As for the $50 rate, it kind of depends. $50 an hour, at a 40 hour workweek year round puts you at roughly $100k a year, pretty reasonable salary I think at an experience level between jr and sr. And in a startup you can even do a bit of equity financing and pay a lower salary, in terms of pure cashflow $50 could even be on the high end in highly bootstrapped startups. But that's if you employ someone.

If you outsource it to a decent dev team, then no way, you always pay a substantial multiple. For example I recall at my job as a student doing administrative work at a big corp, I had a $15 an hour wage and billed the client $120 an hour, no joke. My boss had a $50 an hour salary and billed $400. $150 and up per hour is pretty typical afaik.

You make it sound like $50/hr devs are stupid and not able to devise such a clever trick but reality is not like that.

Sure there is a difference but it's not in your example, the pre-uploading feature was hardly there in the first app versions and it's not something that some smart iOS dev invents on a whim and bakes into an app, it's a deliberate feature requiring collaboration between several teams.

Most of all, features like that are created because there are (amazing) devs whose sole job is to make the app better, and they've been doing it for what, 6 years now.

How many people are on the iOS Instagram team? How much are they paid per year?

You may be wrong. One of the founder of Instagram has said he wasn't a very good coder when they built the product. He further said some of that old code was still inside the product.

Are you implying that to be a good developer you need to live in a place where 50$/h is considered entry level?

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