amkahal
Hi,
Please i want your help to determine what is the best price of a small accounting system.
my goal is to say to the client, you should pay xxx $, and want be sure that he will not disagree.
a short description about the system:
the system is for a small institute that provides english and computer courses for kids, so we want to register those kids one by one, and make vouchers, then keep tracking of the number of registered, payments, vouchers. etc...
- written in VB.NET or C#
- database of at least 3 tables and at most 6 tables with no complicated relations.
- MS SQL server 2005
- estimated required time to finish it, is 2 hours of work/day during 6 days.
- i want to provide three months of support
any help is appreciated.
Ayman
Based on the number of hours for the work time and the number of hours for the time spent on support you should get a total for example. Total price to ask for = (hours of work * how much your charge per hour on development) + (expected hours of support * how much you charge per hour on support ) as simple as that.
But I personally recommend not to tell them that you will finish in 6 days give yourself a couple of extra day make it 9 or 10. You can never know what you can run into. Sometimes getting stuck on a trivial thing may waste like 2 hours when you get frustrated. Take your time and test it well too as more time is usually spent on testing and debugging.
Furthermore design your code in a way it is more maintainable for future updates. Most clients are never satisfied with their initial requirements, expect them to keep asking on more additions later on and make sure you charge them for that too once it is requested.
arithma
What Ayman described is the cost for the service and not the price of a finished product.
A finished product should be priced based on the value fulfillment and competition.
amkahal
Thank you guys, but what if I'm asking about a range of prices, for example: 100$~500$, 500$~1000$, 1000$~2000$, ....
in which range you classify such project ?
arithma
A custom accounting software with support for a year could easily be sold for $5000.
So it's not unreasonable for a newcomer to the market to have a base asking price of $2000.
Anything below that, and you'll be feeling the pain of supporting retarded business needs and "tweaks".