It would cost $175k to clone Instagram | Hacker News Reader

It would cost $175k to clone Instagram

pricetaghq.com

4 pointsandgarzon16 comments

I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to terms with and accommodate that. The first 80% of Instagram is the app and sharing, the next 20% of building the network out is where all the value was created and the majority of development time was invested.

The founders described it as "replacing all the components of a car while driving it at 100mph", and even having worked on projects orders of magnitude smaller (albeit with a considerably more complex datamodel) I can't say I disagree.

True. I watched an interview of one of the founders and he revealed that Instagram is just a offshoot feature of their original product. So the cost of mistakes are not taken into account.

It's like someone proving out that E=MC^2 AFTER Einstein already figured out the problem.

It's still a cool exercise to do! I wish he would do that for more sites and apps! I bet the Draw Something app isn't that expensive to reproduce.

Agree with both of you guys. And of course I am making a lot of assumptions, but wanted to help devs realize the value of different components of a business. Because if that wasn't the case, Facebook could have just build an app just like Instagram.

Very interesting article, and besides all the good and proper reasons for this, I also believe it was a way for facebook to "show off" how much they have and can spend. And yes good teams are worth a whole lot.

Yes, there is a lot of marketing involved in this acquisition, besides the importance of Instagram in the industry.

Awesome article. I think Facebook did the correct move, otherwise, other big tech company would have acquired Instagram instead.

Drop.io: $10M Snaptu: $70M Instagram: $1000M Having everybody talk about your latest acquisition: Priceless! There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Facebook.

It is a great app, but I think Facebook overpaid

Interesting, sometimes we underestimate the value of assets that cannot be easily estimate

It's a nice app based on a simple idea. It's worth it.

BRB, making Instagram

I guess developing is being too easy...

Really interesting! Looks like FB overpaid! Ha

I guess teams are worth a lot more than I thought

Finally someone takes a different stab at the Instagram news!

I thinks is worth it. A great app. And a good strategy of FB to absorb a potencial competitor

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