What was funny to me was that the author claimed, "Ah, those are just silly, throw-away apps I developed for my kids and friends." at the start of the article, and then jumped to, "I dedicated $500,000 worth of my efforts on these apps!" later on in the article. Well, that escalated way too quickly ....
Also, what is that statement that amounts to "Nobody uses Android in San Francisco"? I found it pretty ridiculous ....
To be fair, he claimed that those he would have charged out each of those apps at 50K for custom development time. I don't know if he has the pipeline, infrastructure, etc. to actually bill out clients for Android apps at that rate, but that doesn't sound like an extremely high number to me for custom software work.
You are confusing $500K worth of "work" with $500K worth of billing. A common problem in our industry.
Yeah, except he himself described the first app as "simple" and the next 9 apps after the first consisted of nothing more than changing the YouTube channel id the app pointed to and changing the app's name.
$50,000 seems pretty exorbitant for a "simple" app that does nothing more than embed YouTube videos.
$50,000 for the literally 5 minutes of work involved in changing the channel ID and app name is downright comical.
There's no way to spin this as $500,000 worth of work. I don't care what his billing rates are. (And I suspect his billing rates aren't very high to begin with — he doesn't strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed.)
Actually that sort of semi-custom simple rebranding is an exceedingly common business model for boutique software shops. You find a market where the framework for your application works with minimal changes across a large variety of clients. The sales cycle then becomes the scaling bottle neck. It is sort of the other side of the coin of low touch SaaS.
You are making a common mistake on pricing something based on the amount of work it requires, not on the amount of value it provides. I can't imagine that a rebranded youtube viewer provides 50K worth of value to anyone, but it wouldn't be nearly the most outlandish work/value ratio I've seen.
50K of "billing" time for a prototype that views one youtube channel seems excessive. At $150/hr that's over 2 months of fulltime development for something a real developer could knock out in a couple days.
I don't think he could have found clients gullible enough to pay that much for what's essentially a web view in a minimal wrapper. But I suck at the marketing.
