Via Simon Willison’s post about the 2006 Future of Web Apps Summit, I found notes for Ryan Carson’s talk about building web apps on a budget. In the talk Ryan breaks down the budget for starting up DropSend:
|>. Budget (£) |. Need | |>. 5,000 | Branding & UI design | |>. 8,500 | Development of web app (developers also given small equity stake) | |>. 2,750 | Desktop apps (Windows and Mac) | |>. 1,600 | Building XHTML/CSS | |>. 500 | Hardware (internal development server) | |>. 800 | (per month) hosting and maintenance | |>. 2,630| Legal fees | |>. 500 | Accounting fees | |>. 500 | Linux-specialist fees | |>. 1,950 | Misc. fees (trips, replace broken hardware) | |>. 250 | Trademark | |>. 200 | Merchant account | |>. 500 | Payment processor’s setup fee | |>. 25,680 | Total |
That is about $45K in US dollars. In other words, you can launch a new web application for less than a skilled technology worker’s salary. Or, if you are a skilled technology worker, you can do much of the work yourself and launch a new web application for about $25K.
Got an itch to scratch?