> I tried finding contractors to do it, and the lowest I could find at the time were around 90/hr. While I could find great iOS devs for half of that. I ended up having an iOS dev re-write the app in Obj-C for much cheaper than it would have been to add new features to the old Xamarin app.
An employee working 40 hours per week clocks in around 2K hours annually. Lets assume a freelance developer wants to have a life and largely stick to the same 2K hours. Within that time frame, the developer has to subtract time for running the business, overhead, sick days, vacation days, gaps between projects, non paying clients and the list goes on. By time time the year is up, a freelancer might be hard pressed to bill out 1600 hours.
At 1600 hours at $90 / hour, a freelancer is looking at $144,000. In most of the top cities of the world (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney) this doesn't get you far. This probably doesn't even get you the salary + benefits of a typical engineer with a decent company in San Francisco. And if you have to deal with the stress of running a business, then you should be looking at making a bit more than you would as an employee, otherwise it isn't worth the stress.
At half that rate, you are talking about the same scenario, except for in much cheaper cities. Sure, you're making quit a bit more than the people stocking shelves at Walmart, but you probably aren't even making enough to be worth the added stress of running your own business. You would be better off just by signing on with another company as a salaried engineer.
I think we take for granted that we can pick up a developer from anywhere at any time to work on our idea. We don't have to open a business and go through a bunch of red tape to hire an employee. We need to remember that while that hourly rate seems high, we are still saving a bundle of money over the traditional route.
So, $90 / hour is cheap. I know junior Wordpress! freelancers who charge that because they have to due to their location. In this case, the premium isn't in what they know, it's in where they live. Those same iOS devs wouldn't be charging $45 / hour if they lived in the above mentioned cities. Not unless they are living in Mom's basement.
Keep in mind the above numbers are for someone who can actually run a business. A lot of freelancers are hopeless on the business side and don't last long.
The bottom line is that you were able to get iOS developer to do work at half the rate of Xamarin developers and you were happy with the work. But don't say that $90 / hour is expensive.