
Ask HN: How much could I estimate my project? - Quenhus
Hi HackerNews, I&#x27;m a young student and I develop little projects for fun during my free time. My problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to estimate the potential of my work, if it&#x27;s possible. I don&#x27;t study computer science for now, so no teacher could answer me and that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m asking to you.
How much would this 3D Solar Power Plant simulator cost if a company needed to pay for it?
If it&#x27;s impossible to answer, I&#x27;m also interested in understanding why.<p>Here is my work : https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.husnet.fr&#x2F;quentin&#x2F;SolarPowerPlant&#x2F;<p>Here more precision : it&#x27;s a solar power plant simulator library that gives the potential power generated by the plant, according to a lot of parameters : mirrors&#x27; geometry, sun position, latitude,... It&#x27;s in Javascript and works thanks to ThreeJS.<p>Thanks a lot.
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itamarst
Don't charge by the day! Your costs have nothing to do with how much it's
worth to a customer.

Talk to companies that might be target market. Figure out how much it would
save them.

1\. Nothing. But maybe you can use feedback to improve the product so it is
worth something to them.

2\. It saves them $10000 a year. You can't charge $25,000.

3\. It saves them $5000000 a year. You can charge more than $25000.

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Quenhus
Thanks for the advice. I don't think that a company is interested about this
project. However, it would be absolutely awesome and I might start looking for
that when I will be a little bit more professional.

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onion2k
_How much would this 3D Solar Power Plant simulator cost if a company needed
to pay for it?_

I reckon 25 days is a fair estimate. That breaks down to;

1 day to research sun position, azimuth, etc.

2 days to figure out the various bits of maths involved and write code to do
the calculations.

4 days to build a working interactive 3D model.

2 days to build the charts and tables.

5 days for a designer to make a great layout, build assets, etc.

6 days to bring everything together in a website that works across different
browsers.

3 days for device testing.

2 days to cover meetings, phone calls, etc.

At a rate of $800/day that's $20,000. I'd add a $5,000 (20%) buffer on to that
to cover unexpected scope changes.

$25,000 for what appears to be a single page might sound high, but if the
company is getting, say, $500,000 of value from it then it's _really_ cheap. I
know of agencies that would charge 10* that if they thought the client could
afford it.

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crobertsbmw
That assumes $800 a day. If the OP is a student, whoever is hiring him is
probably expecting to pay closer to $200 a day. But they should also probably
assume it's going to take a student 4x longer to finish the project (if ever),
so it probably comes out to about the same price either way.

~~~
Quenhus
Yes I'm a student so $200/day sounds great. Though, I'm not even sure that a
company could be interested about my project. I was not asking its value in
order to sell it, but just to start conceiving how much does a a project cost
for a company. Thanks a lot for your reply.

