How much would it cost?

DemonOfTheFall

I'm just looking for an idea how much a custom project would cost for an idea of what I should be charging myself.

Lets say a huge company (<€1bn turnover) is looking for a database solution to catalog issues arising all over the country. It has to be web accessible because it has to be accessed by clients and suppliers.

Each of their locations around the country would have approximately 3000 of these issues entered per year, maybe 20 such locations.

The main idea of the system is that a client can enter an issue complete with photo and relevant documents, which the company in question can then comment on and hand it over to their suppliers to sort out.

The system should also be able to generate reasonably complex reports in .doc, .pdf, whatever file format, based on criteria like all issues involving a supplier, all issues that have passed deadline etc.

Future integration for other modules should be possible, as well as possible mobile access to it via Pocket PC with camera integration.

To design this system, how much do think is a fair price?

To host this system for them, with high availabilty, what do you think is a fair price?

Thanks for any advice

DJB

This is more complex then you may think. Are you thinking of developing it by yourself? Not sure what your overheads are like but I'd be talking about 20k-40k maybe for a full custom solution. For hosting, you'd probably want a dedicated server and you'd be looking at about 300 per month (to start) for one of them. That's my estimate but you really need to define the project spec in greater detail.

Best of luck!

misterq

a fair price is your hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours you think it will take. If you are taking on this project I assume you have enough experience to know how much time it will take.

In relation to hosting, I think you should arrange it for them by all means, but ensure that they have a direct relationship with the hosting company so you don't get the blame for downtime. Not worth the hassle.

mneylon

The hosting costs would depend on how critical the system was and how much data needed to be stored, number of concurrent connections, processes etc.,. You're probably looking at a cluster of servers - not just one

DemonOfTheFall

Sorry I phrased the first post a bit wrongly. They actually already bought a system like this for what I thought seemed like a lot, but on a bit of further thought it probably wasn't such an outlandish price at all.

I knew the pricing for colo/dedicated/etc but was just wondering what kind of price people thought would be fair to manage hosting it for them. Uptime not critical, but not losing their data would be critical.

ron_darrell

I think I'm missing something here but 3000 issues per year is less than 10 issues per day, times 20 is still only 200 issues per day for the entire country. Not a large number to handle. The rest of what you are looking for including the mobile access, reports etc is also quite rudimentary. The only problem I see is ensuring the site stays up for a reasonable amount of time with high turnaround on downtime. The coding should probably cost in the region of €10K but the ongoing costs of server and maintenance would shove the price right up.

It's very hard to gauge that part of the price. If the customer already has a server and IT dept to look after it then the price would be quite low (maybe only an extra wage a year to handle the entire country), if not then you would need to price the service from a service provider. The other problem of course is ensuring that the various substations have a reliable internet connection because if they can't get on the net the can't raise an issue. But that cost seems outside the scope of the project.

Just my opinion
-RD

DemonOfTheFall

Thats more what I was thinking ron, the server load would really be quite low with those kind of figures.

The information to be stored is fairly simple as well and you could knock together a Pocket PC app with camera integration in a day in all likelihood, if your web service end was well designed for it to bolt into it.

CoNfOuNd

My guestimate is €20k on initial development, but I don't see a need for a 'cluster of servers'. Perhaps €5k/year for server costs and on-going maintenance.