Development costs

[Guest]

I've been working on a project in my spare time (nights and weekends) ever since VB.NET was released. The project has ~200k lines of code (plus ~50k lines of comments). I've had the luxury of working at a leisurely pace so (in my opinion) the code is extremely well organized, has very low redundancy, is highly generalized (when possible), thoroughly tested, and (thanks to .NET) significantly more advanced than anything else on the market. The project also contains a fair amount of technical (e.g., math and physics) code and I've made a significant effort to utilize the features of .NET

Eventually, I would like to enter some type of agreement with a single company who would have exclusive distribution rights for the software. But, before entering such an agreement I need to determine the value of my software. I think a good starting point would be to determine the expected development cost for this type of project

Is there any info available that discusses typical development costs for this type of project? Also, just out of curiosity, how many lines of code does a typical programmer produce per year

Thanks for any info
Lanc

 

[Cor]

Hi Lance,

I can only give you a short opinion about my knowledge of it.

Do never make development cost the base of your commercial product.
It has no sense. The value of the product is what the customer will pay.

So you have to look what you want, some thoughts.
- you want people to make extra products with your product that customers
need, by instance developers, then sell your developing product as cheap as
possible.
- You have a product needed by rich companies or person, who can
increase there income even more with it, sell it as expensive you can they
are willing to pay.
- You want to get on the high volume market. Sell it as cheap you can to
get an entree in the market (examples Internet Explorer, Norton, etc)

However, try to get advice from a commercial person, not from developers as
most of us are here.

Bringing a product to the market is not what we do, decimal 1+1 = 2

Just my thought,

Cor

 

[Al Reid]

Lance,

There are many ways to estimate the cost of a software project DAGS on "software cost estimate" but few will probably apply to your
situation. There is Function Point analysis, COCOMO, etc.

So here is what I would do.

First, figure out how many hours you have in to the project and multiply by a cost/hour. (1000 * 60.000= $60,000)

Now, figure out what the market share is for your product (How many can you realistically sell) Say 100. Then you need to sell it
for 600 each.

Next, how does that compare to other competitive products? Are there any other competitive products. If your price is too high,
you may not sell enough to recoup your investment. Any thing you sell over the original estimated sales volume is gravy.

I know that this probably doesn't help, just my $0.02.

 

[CJ Taylor]

I know that this probably doesn't help, just my $0.02.

There are a lot of pennies in the group...

 

[Guest]

Thanks a lot for your feedback

Do never make development cost the base of your commercial product. It has no sense. The value of the product is what the customer will pay

Yes, that is a good point, but in my case I'm hoping to effectively sell the entire project to some other company who will then sell the individual software licenses to the customers. In this case I feel that I need to have a general idea for how much my project would cost to develop. For example, I can't tell a company that I want $2M if it would only cost $50k for them to produce a similar project from scratch. On the other hand, if a company would expect to invest $2M in order to develop a similar project, then I shouldn't ask for $50k

Of course I also need to keep in mind how much the company will expect to earn by selling the software licenses, which is related to your original point. But, I think I would be setting myself up for a big embarrassment when negotiating with companies if I have no idea what it would cost to develop my project

What I would find most useful is an estimate of how much per line of code a company would expect to invest in order to develop a very well designed, thoroughly tested, and fairly technical application in Visual Basic .NET? $0.25 / line? $10 / line? $100 / line? Honestly, I have no idea

Thanks again
Lanc

 

[John Smith]

the previous answers are good enough, just need to add:

the product price depends on the maket
for instance, you can't expect 1 kg of iron to be sold at same price as
1 kg of gold, do you?