Pricing for custom software

What would be a normal price range for custom software?? Lets say that someone came up to me and wanted me to develop some kind of software for their business. What would I charge them?

Thanks!


And, yes, I know that it would depend upon the complexity of the software. I just wanted to get a general range.

 

I don't believe there is any rule of thumb for ball park figures. If you are makign Software as a business then you are going to apply the rules of business for your pricing...
What are your costs for building the software?
What time frame are you looking at?
Are you hoping to make a profit from the software? If so what sort of %age?
What sort of maintenance are you going to offer to do on it?

What sort of alternatives does the potential customer have to you? How much are they prepared to write the software for? Are you going to have to undercut them?

Professional Business Software (especially tailored solutions as opposed to Off The Shelf can be much more costly... I don't think you are going to get a nice figure off us... you have to offset those factors and probably others to determine a cost...

Sorry its a pretty vague answer but your question leaves a lot in the open too.... Hope it helps anyway!

 

Actually, it does help. Lets say I were do develop custom software for some small business. If it costs ME pretty much $0 to make and it took me about 2 months to fully develop and I offered to set it up and do repairs/upgrades.... would $2000 be reasonable?

Thanks!

-Adam

 

I'm no expert on this kind of thing but am trying to apply some business logic to the problem...
So you say your overheads are $0... that means that whatever you charge is a cost for your time.
Consider the following then... How many hours are you going to spend working on this software? Are you going to be working on this 5 days a week, 7 days a week? And is that going to be 8 hours a day? 15 hours a day? More?
That is your first thing to consider... This will tell you what you are going to be earning per hour for undertaking this project... If you are inexperienced and are doing this to :
a) build experience
b) build a portfolio of some description
Then you can expect to charge less than if you were an experienced Software Engineer...

Remember that this time frame (2 months), and cost you charge is for the FULL Software Lifecycle.
This includes (amongst others):
Analysis of the problem
- make sure you give teh customer EXACTLY what they want
Design
- Don't trust an evolutionary approach to this - plan it in advance
Development
- Coding is only one part of this!
Testing
- Unit test each module and Functionally test the whole solution! Be brutal to the solution - you want to find any problems - not your customer!
Debugging
- This is going to be continuous... Once they have it they will continually find problems to some extent - believe me - this is innevitable... What are you going to do to deal with this?

Hopefully this offers some more insight for you....

 

Thanks!!