How much do programers cost?

[Cubethulhu]

I have an idea for a pretty simple program that could potential make a lot of money. So right now I'm at the planing stage and am currently trying to find out rough cost of the project. So I was wondering how much programers cost on average. Taking into account the project is rather simple and I probably will only need one.

[cphite]

I have an idea for a pretty simple program that could potential make a lot of money. So right now I'm at the planing stage and am currently trying to find out rough cost of the project. So I was wondering how much programers cost on average. Taking into account the project is rather simple and I probably will only need one.

It's very difficult to even give you an estimate since you haven't given any indication of what kind of programming you actually need. Given that you describe the project as rather simple, I will offer this advice: Buy a book on programming and do it yourself. It's bound to be cheaper than hiring someone.

[Panonadin]

If it's very basic, the above is true, learning programming isn't too difficult for simple things.

However, more detail is needed to give you even a ball park.

[poochyena]

me being an amateur programmer, if someone asked me to program something but didn't know what to pay me, i would just ask for like 10% or 20% of the profit they make from the program or something o.O
any amateur programmer would be cheap since there mainly gonna do it for the experience probably

[Shivahn]

If it's very basic, the above is true, learning programming isn't too difficult for simple things.

However, more detail is needed to give you even a ball park.

"Simple" to someone who doesn't know how to program and "simple" to a programmer can mean very different things. Though, there is always the possibility that it is truly simple.

me being an amateur programmer, if someone asked me to program something but didn't know what to pay me, i would just ask for like 10% or 20% of the profit they make from the program or something o.O
any amateur programmer would be cheap since there mainly gonna do it for the experience probably

That's true, but you might want someone more experienced, for a commercial application. There's a pretty big problem though, in that it's hard to convince someone skilled that they should do all the work for something and then receive 20% of the profits.

[HungryHobo]

How well do you want the work done? would it just be a basic website or a phone app which acts like a website?

[Steax]

Additionally, programmers have no set cost. The same project could be done for $100 and $10000 - you just get a different product (in terms of quality, expandability, speed, aesthetics, testing assurance, etc). Your best bet is toss them your budget, and let them tell you what they'll make for it.

[cphite]

Do you have any friends or co-workers who program? If so, find one and tell them your idea, and ask them what they think it would take. If they think it's within their scope of abilities, ask them what they'd be willing to do it for. Decide if what they offer is acceptable to you. If it is, great - get something in writing. If it's not, thank them for their time and ask someone else.

[douglasm]

It depends very much on the caliber of programmer you want.

Do it yourself? Free, but you'll have to learn how and it probably won't turn out well.
Amateur from Craigslist? You might find one willing to do it for $100 or something like that, but the resulting program will likely be horrible quality with lots of bugs - if it even works at all.
Outsource to India? I'd guess somewhere around $10000/year (that's $5/hour). There's a good chance you'll get something that works, but it's still a big gamble and probably won't work well.
Professional programmer in the U.S.? I am one, and my first job right out of college paid $45000/year ($22.50/hour). My current job pays substantially better than that. This is your best chance of getting something that does what you want and does it right, but even so you'll still have to be careful about who you hire because there are a lot of idiots and incompetents in the job market - especially since the smart and competent ones tend to get hired and stay hired to a far greater degree.

In general, there's a large measure of "you get what you pay for" in this. Paying a lot is no guarantee of high quality work, but anyone willing to work for low pay probably isn't good at the job.

To add to this, you are almost certainly underestimating the complexity and difficulty of your program. Very few people who aren't programmers themselves really have a good grasp on just how complicated it can be. Imagine supervising the most moronic literalist worker ever - someone who, when told "put the peanut butter on the bread", picks up the jar of peanut butter and places it on top of the loaf of bread, and if told to put the laundry in the washing machine will neither put in the detergent nor turn the machine on without additional instructions. Computers are like that worker, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

If you describe the program more, we could give you more specific advice. Heck, someone (or even me) might offer in this thread to make it for you.

[Steax]

To add to this, you are almost certainly underestimating the complexity and difficulty of your program. Very few people who aren't programmers themselves really have a good grasp on just how complicated it can be.

Heck, even a lot of programmers fail to grasp how complicated things are, even when they've seen the finished product.

[Meem1029]

If you describe the program more, we could give you more specific advice. Heck, someone (or even me) might offer in this thread to make it for you.

Very true. Honestly, there's a chance that someone (me for example) might just decide that it's a fun problem and do it because it's interesting. And I almost guarantee you that if it's an idea that is both simple and could make you a lot of money, someone has thought of it before.

[Steax]

If you describe the program more, we could give you more specific advice. Heck, someone (or even me) might offer in this thread to make it for you.

Very true. Honestly, there's a chance that someone (me for example) might just decide that it's a fun problem and do it because it's interesting. And I almost guarantee you that if it's an idea that is both simple and could make you a lot of money, someone has thought of it before.

Adding to the last bit: and don't worry about sharing your idea, even if it could make a lot of money. People in general don't just steal your idea and run - and in the world of programming, if your thing is that brilliant, copycats, open-source versions, forks and other derivates are going to pop up anyway.

[Cubethulhu]

Sorry for the super late response. I just moved and it made it impossible to get back on this site for a while. The idea is a program that would scan your computer (With your permission of course.) then proceed to analyze what kind of build you have for your computer. The idea being it would tell you what you could upgrade with your current rig and what you would have to upgrade in order to get the most out of your current rig. A friend of mine tells me there's already a site that does this so I kind of just let this one slip away from me. You know my usual response.

[Carnildo]

The idea is a program that would scan your computer (With your permission of course.) then proceed to analyze what kind of build you have for your computer. The idea being it would tell you what you could upgrade with your current rig and what you would have to upgrade in order to get the most out of your current rig.

To the extent that it's doable, that's a research and data-entry problem rather than a coding problem. If you're willing to trust Windows to report hardware correctly, any competent programmer could put together the scanning and upgrade-check portions in a day or two, and give it a decent UI in a couple of weeks. Your two major problems are:

1) Not all hardware can be detected by software. The big one is the power supply: you can't tell if the user has a 1200-watt monster or a 200-watt OEM supply that can barely power the system as-is. Other important things you can't detect are the heatsink (some aftermarket heatsinks are too big to fit on all mainboards) and the case (if they've got a low-profile case, they can't use full-height expansion cards).

2) There's a lot of hardware out there. You'll need to record all of that in a database so that you can tell, for example, that although the user's mainboard socket supports a faster CPU, the BIOS doesn't, that despite having four PCIe x16 slots, the mainboard doesn't support SLI, and that there are no WinXP drivers for the gigabit network card you're about to suggest. You'll only need one programmer for a month or so, but you'll need dozens of data-entry clerks for months to build the database, more months (and probably millions of dollars in hardware) to properly QA the database, and a continuing effort to keep it up to date. A programmer is not the major expense here.

[Steax]

Especially if it becomes a commercial product. If it misleads people to buy incompatible parts, you'll have a lot of angry users. This is also in many ways a "hack" project; many parts of it will involve writing complex or tricky code. For example, how would you determine if you have graphics issues? I'd say run a benchmark, and that's no trivial matter. Things like that. It's also a project with many gothchas, like you have to make sure your recommendations don't exceed OS limits or points of just-too-much-ness. It's a tricky issue that you'll probably best solve with consultants on board.

[elasto]

Also, don't forget that the Windows Experience Index exists, which largely suffices for the the 'low-detail' version of what you're proposing: ie people can see if their graphics card/memory/whatever is the biggest bottleneck in their system.

Personally I would be very suspicious of any product that gave me a more detailed recommendation than that. I mean, suppose I ran it and it recommended I buy some AwesomeSauce memory sticks and an UberWuber disk drive as the best upgrade path for me; How would I know that that's not simply because AwesomeSauce and UberWuber just quietly passed a few $$$s to you to get to the top of the 'recommended list'?

[HungryHobo]

What I'd love is something which listed games which are likely to run on my laptop.

Steam or similar could do it since they have the data: the specs of machines using steam along with how many hours games have been played on those machines.

if people with very similar machines have been playing a game a lot there's a good chance I could run it.

[poochyena]

something kind of like this?
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/intro.aspx