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Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

$40,000 dollars sounds cheap

$40,000 is ridiculously cheap when you realise how little effort can go in to building, say, a master-data management software, which licenses for many hundreds of thousands per year.

Or, consider the average salary of a programmer with enough operating systems knowledge to write this.

But then, supply and demand is a strange thing.

Really? How many hours do you think it'd take to write something like this?

botnets make that much everyday

Assuming that, you'd think the author of this codebase would have done some sort of calculation on expected daily return from renting a botnet created via this software, and priced it accordingly. There is a calculation similar to what I described to determine what a successful poker bot is worth.

Otherwise it would make more sense to just run it themselves -- although that would of course expose them to [more] legal risk. Reminds me of bitcoin mining -- can you make more money selling ASIC miners or just mining BTC with the ones that you've built?

Probably stolen software that requires work to deploy.

It is absolutely not about the hours taken to write it, but the skill and knowledge required.

How many hours does it take a doctor to remove your appendix? Is that a relevant metric to judge or place a cost on?

You need to read up on how capitalism actually works. It doesn't matter if the thing was written in 30 seconds. The price comes from the perceived value of it.

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