Cost of Software Development
Highlighting how much money you need to be a software entrepreneur.
It is an exciting thing to explore how much money we need to develop an app from scratch. Software development is a millionaire path, sometimes a billionaire path for entrepreneurs, and one of the paths that don't require a large amount of capital to invest compared to other businesses. But everything has a price and in this article, we are going to find out how much time or money you need to invest as a software entrepreneur.
Acquiring the Software Development Knowledge
Whatever you want to do in your life, everything starts from acquiring knowledge. For example, You probably already know how to drive a car but you need more knowledge if you want to fly an airplane.
Every piece of software development technology has documentation and since those are free, if you can find and read them, there is no cost for acquiring the software development knowledge. But it could be so hard since you won't know what topic to find when starting. In such a case, you can purchase a few courses that can cost you between $10 to a couple hundred dollars depending on the source you choose. This will give you a starting point.
You need a computer science degree to get a job but it is not required to be an entrepreneur. Please don't confuse between education and a degree. You need to know every topic possible from the computer science curriculum to develop a great application. Just don't need the degree. So if you can learn the topics on your own, then you don't need to take debt for your degree. We have Elon Musk as a living example. He founded SpaceX (a Rocket company) by reading every book he could find on rocket science. Education is crucial. A degree is not. So, to summarize, the cost to acquire software development knowledge can vary from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
Domain Name
Domain name is one of the investments you should make early on. It is a process to own a unique place on the internet and if others have taken your dream brand name, it is probably gone forever or maybe you need to trade a huge amount of money to make it yours.
I think of a catchy name whenever I have downtime during my commute or before bedtime. And I write them down to the notes and keep thinking for several days for other ideas. By doing so, I finally got a name I like that represents well about my business idea. Domain names usually cost around $13.
Hosting the Application
Developing the app locally is great but it is always better to host it on the cloud so that you can share it with your environment for a demo purpose. Nowadays, you can host for free on many platforms during the development of your app and later pay a price on usage when you launch the app. You also need a place to store your source codes and this is mostly free. You can host it on many platforms like GitHub or BitBucket.
Logo Design
A logo represents your identity so this is one of the important investments you need to make. Some companies spend millions of dollars for a logo that represents well for their business.
If we need to spend that money when starting, it would be a disaster, isn't it? Well, if you don't have that much money, you can do it later. You might heard some companies do the process called rebranding which is changing the logo or sometimes everything. Sometimes it might cost you much more than money because your customers remember you in one form and suddenly it changed.
You can also try to come up with a concept and design it by yourself. For example here is how I designed my logo for this blog.
Conversations represent the discussion with readers. Books represent knowledge sharing. I combined both to get the shape of the letter B. I did 80+ iterations of re-drawing it and finally got one I am satisfied. So the cost is zero for my case for logo design. Of course, graphic designers can come up with a better logo identity but for now, I am ok with that. Maybe rebrand it later.
Domain Emails
An email address like support@yourdomain.com is crucial for software service. Domain emails cost around $6 per email per month. And you are going to need some domain emails when you launch your app. For example,
- support@yourdomain.com
- info@yourdomain.com
- feedback@yourdomain.com
- marketing@yourdomain.com
- development@yourdomain.com, etc...
Then your team member-related emails like
- shaun@yourdomain.com
- morgan@yourdomain.com, etc...
Prototyping
Prototyping is one of the best concepts before you invest a large amount of time and money in your product. By having a prototype first, you get the feeling of what your application could look like in actuality. You can even share it with anyone you know or with your existing customers and get real feedback and see if they are excited to use it or if they don't like it. This can save you a ton of time and resources before you decide it is a worthwhile application to continue your work. It also clarifies the requirements when you work with a team.
Any prototyping software can work but my favourite is Figma for Design plus prototyping and FigJam for Entity Relationship Diagrams(EOD). By the time of this writing, they cost $15 for Figma and $5 for FigJam per user per month. There are many options to choose from. The personal plan usage is free of charge. It won't cost you money if you don't have a team yet. You can check it out on their pricing page.
Thank you for reading. Is this article helpful? What do you have in mind? Please let us know in the comment section. If you enjoy this article, you might enjoy our other article about 5 stages of a profitable business.
Zaw Thet Tin Alex Hicks
