What you can actually build for $50,000

$39,000 – $60,000 covers a customer app on iPhone and Android from one shared codebase, sign-in, two kinds of user with different screens, document upload, push notifications when something changes, a web portal your staff run it from, and a couple of reports. Brand colors exist, nobody has drawn any screens, and nothing is built behind it yet.

• 01

  Customers sign in and see their own history.

• 02

  They upload a document when you ask for one.

• 03

  They get a notification when something on their account changes.

• 04

  Your staff work from a web portal, answer people and pull reports.

• 05

  Two kinds of user, on separate screens, with separate permissions.

That’s a whole product, and it isn’t a large one. The staff portal alone is about $12,500 of it, for the reasons the office half of a build goes into. Price your own list and take things off it until the number sits where you need it.

Four things, each of them a single sentence in a meeting and each of them thousands of dollars.

+$11,000

Working with no signal

+$7,500

A separate iPhone app and a separate Android app

+$7,000

Messaging between people

+$4,000

Paying by card in the app

Working with no signal is the most expensive at about $11,000, because it’s two jobs rather than one: storing the work on the phone, then reconciling it when the phone comes back. In a build this size those two cost about the same as each other. Two separate apps instead of one that covers both phones adds $7,500 and gives your users nothing they can see. Messaging is $7,000. Card payment is the cheapest at $4,000, and it’s cheap only because the foundations are already paid for: on its own it’s a $19,000 – $27,000 project.

None of these are luxuries. They’re ordinary requirements that get mentioned in passing, and the signal one alone takes the middle of this build to $60,500. Say them out loud early, while there’s still a choice about which ones make it into the first release.

Because $39,000 – $60,000 is the estimate for that scope, and $50,000 sits in the middle of it. A budget set at the middle of a range has no room in it. The top of that range is where the contingency lives, for the things nobody has thought of yet, and the bottom quietly assumes none of them happen.

Scoping to the midpoint

You describe $39,000 – $60,000 of work, hold $50,000, and hope the project lands on the good side. Every unknown that resolves badly comes out of something you wanted.

Scoping to the bottom

Drop the staff portal, add the card payment you were going to need anyway, and the same idea prices at $33,000 – $50,000. The top of that is your budget. What you don’t spend goes on the things nobody could have known until people used it.

The range narrows as the description gets specific, so the two moves compound. Writing a brief that leaves nothing open is the other half of landing a fixed budget.

Three, and the first is worth more than the other two put together.

$29,000 – $43,000

A smaller staff portal, one report instead of a dashboard, notifications later: 27% less

$36,000 – $55,000

Reports out of the first release

$38,000 – $57,000

Launching on one platform instead of two

The first is really three cuts moving together, and the estimator picks them: the staff portal shrinks to a simple internal screen, the dashboard becomes one report, and notifications wait. Together they take 27% off, most of it the portal. Building the full version afterward means building it once, against what your staff turned out to need.

Taking reports out saves $4,000 on its own, and reports built before anyone has used the thing tend to get rebuilt anyway. One platform saves $2,000, which is less than most people expect from halving the app, because one codebase was already covering both phones. Note that the first trade already contains the second, so you can’t add these up. What belongs in a first version covers what a cut like this is really for.

It’s enough for one app that does one job well, for a business that already knows what the job is. It stops being enough the moment your description picks up a second “and also”.

What $50,000 fits

One clearly described product, two kinds of user, a handful of features that all serve the same purpose, and a business that can answer questions inside a week.

What it doesn’t

Three products with one budget stapled to them. An app plus a portal plus a public website plus a connection to a system nobody has documented. The list is what costs money, and each item on it looks small on its own.

There’s a floor at the other end. An app with sign-in and nothing else on it prices at $18,000 – $28,000, so below roughly that you’re buying foundations with almost nothing standing on them, and an off-the-shelf product will serve you better. What an app costs before any feature exists has the figure underneath it.

14–21 weeks from kickoff to something people can install, with store review inside that. The narrower first version comes in at 13–19 weeks, which is barely sooner, because the parts you cut aren’t the parts that set the calendar.

Money and time don’t trade against each other much at this size. Spending more rarely makes it arrive sooner, and cutting scope buys you money faster than it buys you weeks. Plan the launch date off the calendar figure and leave the budget conversation separate.

Then add rollout. Getting the first twenty people onto a new app, watching what confuses them and fixing it, is real work that happens after the build is finished and before anybody would call the project a success. Budget attention for it, not just money.