16Jul How We Built an iPhone App for $4873.92

So last year I read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, inspiring, then I started reading his blog, and then he published “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” and I was like whoa, that is useful information.

But it turns out that if you do your own development work, you can launch an iPhone app for even less. Here’s what we spent:

Development costs

$99/year - The Apple iPhone Developer Program fee. I believe this is referred to as a “bozo filter.”
$297.98 - Emergency RAM. For a while we had to parse a 12gb XML file. Every day. Louis got 8 more gigs for his Mac Pro overnighted out.
$3000 (approximate) - Apple World Wide Developer Conference and travel: This is a biggie. It included airfare for Louis from the east coast to San Francisco and then from SF to LA, where I live - we took the opportunity to hang out for a week and work on the app hardcore.

Design assets

$130 - The app icon: we knew we’d need a 57×57 pixel icon for the iPhone, but we also wanted a vector version as a general art asset. We posted a $65 assignment to Pixish and ended up with five icons to choose from, one of which was a clear winner. We paid $65 again for refinements to the icon.
$600 - Category icons: We needed 28 custom icons to represent store categories. We looked at royalty-free ecommerce icon sets from Stockicons.com and others - the problem was, many of our shopping categories weren’t represented, so custom was the way to go.

Deployment costs

$340/year - Joyent Connector: We prepaid for a year of service. Our server is extremely important to the app and Joyent is solid.
$120/year - DreamHost: We use DreamHost for a bunch of miscellaneous services, and this also included our domain name.

This website

$59 - RapidWeaver 4: Because I’m not a web designer I was looking for a tool with great theme support, and RapidWeaver is it. Awesome web design is expensive (or, as they say, priceless), mediocre web design is cheap, but because I knew we’d be updating the site on a regular basis I didn’t want to be going back to a freelancer every five minutes with little changes, so I decided to handle it myself.
$19.95 - Silk theme: Silk is a beautiful theme for RapidWeaver, now nobody else use it! Seriously, with the tons of color controls, it was easy to make it look custom.

$99.99 - ScreenFlow: Our screencast isn’t actually done yet, but I’ll be using ScreenFlow to make it. A great tool for a small niche.
$108 - Blue Snowball mic: This was one of the times when the real world is awesome: I called up my local Guitar Center, they had a Snowball in stock, and I drove over there and picked it up. Seems like a great mic for the price - you can pay more, but why?

Grand total: $4873.92!
Things we didn’t spend money on

Publicity: It seems like iPhone apps are getting noticed by virtue of eager users having fun with the App Store. We may actually do some advertising to get the word out in the near future, but not quite yet.
Offices: Louis lives on the east coast and I’m on the west; we weren’t sure if that was going to work, but it totally does. There are some costs for travel, but on the upside we both work from home and don’t have to pay for office space, so it all balances out.

The main hidden cost
…was of course our time. We’ve been working on this for four months solid, which is a lot of hours. If those hours were billable, it would add up to a metric, uh, fun ton.

A final detail
We didn’t spend frivolously, but we didn’t not buy anything we needed, either. $4873.92 is a shoestring, but it’s not like there was a better string out there for more money, you know?

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