How much should a developer charge for a custom build Jabber client? How many hours would it take to build one? with a very nice UI, Voice and file transfer support.
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NdC
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NdC
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macOS Building a custom Jabber Cliant
- Thread starter Nicolasdec
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It's going depend a lot on how much experience you have with writing desktop clients and working with the XMPP protocol. Are you familiar with an existing XMPP library? What platform(s) are you targeting? What language are you going to use? Have you looked at the XEP-0213: XMPP Intermediate IM Client 2008 or even the XEP-0211: XMPP Basic Client 2008 recommended specifications? If you can't easily implement those then items like voice and file transfer support are going to be a real challenge.
MasConejos
macrumors regular
Generally, for all contract programming, you should probably consider billing per hour, i.e. $50/hr.
If you don't think your client is willing to pay hourly, do an esitmation of how many hours you think it will take you to complete (you should do this step regardless, actually), multiply it by your hourly rate and then round it to a nice whole number (i.e increments of $25, $50, or $100), and then negotiate with the client from there.
if your cleint is too cheap even for that (most are), then use the price of something expensive that you'd like to own in the price range the client is willing to pay, and use that amount.
If you don't think your client is willing to pay hourly, do an esitmation of how many hours you think it will take you to complete (you should do this step regardless, actually), multiply it by your hourly rate and then round it to a nice whole number (i.e increments of $25, $50, or $100), and then negotiate with the client from there.
if your cleint is too cheap even for that (most are), then use the price of something expensive that you'd like to own in the price range the client is willing to pay, and use that amount.
Just to clarify things, I wanted to know how much a developer would charge to build the app with the features above and a nice simple UI. I have very little programing skills on the mac. With a fixed price more or less how much would a developer charge? just so i can get an idea if the project i want to do is worth it.
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italiano40
macrumors 65816
i would do it for $100, because it would take me time to do and plus it would be on top of my job.
Cromulent
macrumors 604
Your either selling yourself short or not planning on putting much effort in. If you are going to charge $100 for something that is likely to take a few days of work (more for people like myself) what is the point? You'd be earning what? $3 - 4 an hour?
italiano40
macrumors 65816
i can easily do what you want, only one problem, i have never done anything with VOIP things in my program so i can't do that, it takes alot of code and a long time to get it to place where it is actually able to send over the internet
Cromulent
macrumors 604
Exactly. So why would you do it for $100? Charge a reasonable amount if you are going to offer to do work for someone.
Oh and it is not for me.
Catfish_Man
macrumors 68030
Having actually worked on quite a few xmpp clients, I can safely say that "working" and "working well" are entirely different things. However, the shortest time I'm aware of from start to impressive demo is 8 days full time, so a few thousand dollars at the rate mentioned earlier. I inherited that project after that and ended up refactoring it until it almost no longer resembled the original code (over a period of several months full time).
Not to sound harsh, but if you can't come up with a rough time estimate for the project yourself than you really shouldn't be doing it.