Estimate the cost of a Web, iOS or Android app

I dislike thinking about stuff like this. It's a waste of time and a distraction from things that truly matter, e.g., Pluto! But, a bunch of jerks already set the stage and the tune and it behooves those of us wanting to profit on that stage to be aware.

If you have data or citations to back up the "most common and easiest to understand" please share, I'm always interested in seeing data. Here's what I have to offer, for what it's worth:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=man-hour&year_...

You're being mentally lazy for no good reason.

Besides, women programmers are often quickly promoted, so yes there's only men left at the bottom level.

However, it's true that criticizing man hours is not understanding language or etymology.

We could go on with things like cowboy and cowgirl. Why do we call adults boys and girls? On the other hand, they are just terms. Just like husband really isn't interpreted as "house bound". Bound, tied to a house, i.e. not free.

But... people being people we see others getting in trouble when son misunderstand etymology and meaning like when people use synonyms for frugality and people find offense. There will doubtlessly be other words which fall into disfavor for looking or sounding too much like a scoundrel word.

How about an acronym, like "thips", totals hours in persons. Throw a poet a bone.

Still i think the parent comment is important. If what you selling is just UI design and coding hours then you are not selling a completed app. Working with the client to go from a napkin sketch or idea to a shipped product involves a lot more work. Perhaps you could update the footnote at the bottom of the page about hosting costs etc to also mention the costs of requirements gathering and shipping. Nearly all of my past clients assume these costs are marginal at most if they think of them at all. Some of the more naive ones have assumed that ongoing support and training was somehow magicly included for free.

Maybe for the audience I think you're targeting: a few big buttons with labels such as "Thailand", "USA", "Western Europe", "Russia", "San Franspesive" and so on?

According to the BLS the average hourly wage (not including overhead) of ALL us software developers is 45.81/hr. I would expect iOS developers to command a premium. Typical overhead of office space, management, equipment, benefits etc could easily add 50-100%

Occupation: Software Developers and Programmers (SOC code 151130) Period: May 2014 Area name: National

Hourly mean wage: 45.81

SOC code: Standard Occupational Classification code -- see http://www.bls.gov/soc/home.htm

Data extracted on July 16, 2015

Extremely common among early (or occasional) SWE freelancers IME, myself included.

IME, you can get to a point where you tally everything up and it comes to $65K, and then you start thinking, well this would be a fun side gig, and I have some free time I otherwise waste, and I sure could buy something cool with even $25K (after tax), and some of my estimates might be a little on the fat side, and this is a buddy (or isn't well funded, or both), and coding is fun enough that I sometimes do it for free anyhow, so I'll bid $45K.

And you've not accounted for the inevitable yak shaves, scope creep items, etc, but you got the work for $30K less than you should/could have.

It also doesn't indicate the kind of application (which is probably a largely stand-alone application). You can't stop some clients from going on to these sites and looking up a cost and not understanding what goes into an estimate. What would be even worse, in my mind, is to have other developers use a tool like this to generate a cost and then fail because they grossly underestimate complexity.

If you aren't communicating the probability of it either being less or more expensive, then you are setting a false expectation.

Or, for that matter, correctly internationalizing the recipes and conversion of measurement units. (You don't want to have add 3.43272 cups of flour to 0.2347 gallons of water, when translating metric to imperial - you'll need logic to scale up/down quantities and round within a given tolerance - which is often narrow when you start baking pastries). Or there might be a service for this specific example that I'm not aware of, but the point is when you go beyond a very narrow scope, I believe this tool breaks down.

I take that as a compliment. :)

Good point from others RE: other countries ... sorry for being so US-centric.

Good idea though! :)

I'm very sure that excluding women wasn't their intent.

My "morning", is literally plugging django-social-auth, a custom User Model, a private messaging Model and few views to make it all work.

I'll grant you that testing might eat up the afternoon, but these are all solved problems that ship in libraries, many of which include their own tests.

Perhaps the people downvoting need to change how they build stuff.