How much does “Uber for Dogs” cost?

We built a tool to help you budget your next app dev project!

Wendy Dean
pushtostart
4 min readJan 2, 2019

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It’s 9pm, Friday night. You’re reclining on the couch, sipping some wine (red, not white) and kicking back after a long day. As you’re flipping through Netflix, a revelation comes to mind.

“Uber… for DOGS!”

So you set out to make this amazing new app, that will change the future as we see it. Only one issue — you can’t do it alone! As you search for a team to develop this killer app, you find a devshop based in some Eastern European country. They make you a dozen promises and you’re inclined to believe them, up until the point they quote you at a $2 million development cost.

Is it reasonable? Are they billing you fairly or robbing you?

Budgeting is difficult for startups that are working with new technology — the costs associated with development are vague and vary greatly depending on different combinations of features. Negotiating a fair price for your app can easily turn into a nightmare: unless you have extensive experience or research on industry prices and development costs, you’re running blind straight into a maze.

We’re all too familiar with this issue. Even software development professionals are plagued by the difficulty of properly budgeting, as software projects continue to run over budget more often and to a greater degree than any other project.

A joint study by McKinsey and Oxford University found software projects go 66% over budget on average.

However, times are changing and we now have better statistical tools to compute a more accurate budget. With the rise of artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning methods, it has become possible to more accurately calculate development budgets at a fair level.

After collecting data on hundreds of thousands of app development projects of all sizes undergone in the last decade, we were able to develop an AI model to predict the budgeting cost of most (> 97%) mobile application projects. The tool has helped us budget internally and has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost overrun.

How Much to Build An App is a web tool that will accurately calculate the cost of your project.

It begins by asking you a series of questions related to your project:

Your answers are then converted into a data model that represents different factors related to cost. Powered by a comprehensive engine, we take into account the different tasks and costs involved with each feature, from design to development and deployment.

This information is then passed onto our AI model, which predicts the cost relation:

As you answer more questions, our AI model adjusts the cost of your project in the top right to reflect development tasks:

And at the end, you’re provided with an accurate estimate of your development cost in an email, along with a breakdown of the cost involved. Separate AI models also calculate a time estimate and provide a risk analysis involved with running overtime on app development projects.

The tool has helped us and countless of our colleagues avoid cost overrun and properly price their project. We are constantly updating our dataset with new projects and costs related to new features, and hope that this tool will help you budget your next app development project!

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