Will your website need to look good on mobile devices?

It's 2016—why are we asking this?

Hey everyone. I'm Mikael founder of Crew, a site we made to help designers and developers find consistent, high quality projects. Before Crew, I was a freelance designer and pricing was always tricky.

A couple years ago we made a tool called How Much To Make An App to help people get a ballpark estimate for how much an app idea is supposed to cost. Since then, over 1 million app makers, entrepreneurs, and businesses have used it to put a dollar figure to an idea.

Today, we' shipped How Much Does a Website Cost which is similar but accounts for different variables in website estimations.

It's based on budgets from 10,000+ project submissions we’ve had on Crew. And we use a mix of variables that account for features and complexity to come to a price.

The budgets aren't necessarily specific to how much it costs to work with an agency, studio, or freelancer (we have a mix of studios, freelancers and agencies on Crew). The budgets are more meant to be ballpark ranges (not final estimates) based on averages we've seen and hitting a quality standard for the final product.

As you know, estimates can vary greatly depending on how you decide to execute on something and what your goal with the end product is (i.e. first version as a test, to be a best-in-class product right now, etc.). But these are the averages we've seen for building something that's top quality.

Would love any input you have. Thanks a lot for taking the time to check it out.

Mikael

If you look up a basic marketing site with search and social share functionality, you get $12-15k.

Someone else on Product Hunt brought up my favorite website pricing analogy: cars.

A 1999 Toyota Corolla and 2016 M5 both have power door locks, air conditioning, and an automatic transmission. They both get you to and from work. But man, are they two different experiences.

This tool is really well done, but for $12,000 I doubt you're getting research, moodboards, wireframes, content written, rounds and rounds of custom design iteration, etc.

$1,300 for adding social sharing buttons... seems pretty high. Maybe more goes into it than changing the button's reference URL?

Social sharing is pulling in the image for "How Much To Make An App". You should update this image: http://howmuchdoesawebsiteco.st/img/og.jpg

Wow that's expensive

lol

My opinion: we're not the target audience for this.

It looks like a nice site and if your company can live up to these prices, or stay close to it, it's a great tool.

Great work, Crew!

Hi Joe,

This could be a useful tool for prospective clients. I hope it brings Crew some successful leads.

One thing I might change however would be the cost associated with "I don't know". If one selects "I don't know" for every field, then the website cost estimate is $0 :)

I'd imagine the less defined the initial scope, the more the range will broaden in potential cost?

Perhaps you made this intentional though.

All the best,

We're not the intended audience, but I can't help to chime in.

I get it - lead gen - but it puts the fixation all over price versus scope.

A lot of the customers coming to these sites can barely describe their app or website.

"It's like Uber meets ice cream delivery with gameification" - - - and then everyone reads tea leaves into a half baked idea that hasn't been thought through.

These tools that "simplify" estimating - set the wrong expectations for customers, the approach can lead to a race to the bottom and thus, lead to unsatisfactory results for the customer.

Different verticals have varying weights of difficulty associated with tackling them.

An app or website that is in banking or finance may have a higher level of difficulty (higher cost) to build versus some rich dentist's side project he's chucking $30k at (versus throwing into the stock market) to build another photo app that will conquer the world.

I know more of the scoping questions get fused into the Crew project process, but that has to come here in this process as well if this is going to be useful.

Help the customer and your Crew gather proper scope and spec. Help them think through what is being addressed.

If a customer can barely describe what they want built, how on earth can you estimate it? If they don't even know.

As it stands now, it's a gimmick that will come back to bite.

every website Cost should be different. Shop for organic products Fuzzy International.

Website pros and cons:

Pros

Inexpensive – usually included in the price of designing your website Works on all devices – you don’t need a separate site for iOS/Android Easy to setup – no submitting to app stores, you just need a domain and hosting.

Cons

No push notifications No offline access No app store presence Poor design can cause problems like: Performance issues Cluttered design Poor usability https://crew.co/how-to-build-an-online-business/build-website-or-mobile-app/

Mobile app pros and cons:

Pros

Push notifications – send text messages to your subscribers Offline access – read articles, listen to podcasts, or browse a product catalog while on an airplane Great performance – a well designed app can be faster than a website Less cluttered – this depends on the website design, but apps tend to have less stuff Get on the app stores – it’s another way to get in front of your customers, you also get a button on their homescreen.

Cons

Extra expense – while some apps are affordable ($49/mo for example) it’s still another cost http://www.archer-soft.com/en/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-build-mobile-app Extra setup – you have to setup the app and submit to the app stores

What a rip-off, I selected the bare bones options and got $3,300 – $3,960, seriously?