Devstimate: Software Cost Esti

If you are a freelance software developer, you have to wrestle with this question often:

"How much does it cost to build an app?"

There is no cookie-cutter answer to this. It varies for each project.

Software project estimation is tedious, and once you estimate, you don't have an easy way to re-use the estimation to other projects. You have to do this estimation process all over again, or try and cut and paste from your older estimations.

You also have to do math to figure out the cost, and who wants to do that. Sure, you might have an excel spreadsheet to help you do some automatic calculations, but it's clunky. You would rather go heat up your coffee and code.

Devstimate is a software cost estimator, and tries to make your estimation workflow a lot easier, and less stressful.

How does it do this you ask?

Well, it lets you re-use the stuff you already estimated again on new estimations. Each task is like a little template, which you can set to any value, and it will always be there for you.

Tired of estimating that authentication flow you always do, and adding that to your cost? Just save it as a task and add default estimation. Did it change slightly on another project? Just override the default value for that project.

You can also create different levels of complexity for a feature. And just choose the right one based on the project. It's all there for you to use whenever you want.

If you're an awesome developer like me, and like to apply estimation techniques in Agile, Devstimate lets you do this by estimating in story points. The estimation app transforms these story points into dollar amounts and gives you a range of cost. You're welcome.

I have built-in, pre-estimated tasks too, that you can use to estimate website cost, or app cost, or estimate back-end efforts. You can also estimate the cost for 3rd party library integrations and other things, out of the box.

And like I said, you can create your own tasks and not use the built-in ones. And mark them up all you wish.

Anyway, here is a list of the features:

- No login necessary, just open and get estimating

- Estimate with flat fees, by hours, or by story points

- Add from pre-built, pre-estimated tasks

- Create your own custom task templates to estimate and re-use on any project

- Search by task categories to find templates quickly

- Swipe to edit or delete a task

- Tap and hold on a task you added to exclude it from the total cost, tap and hold again to include it again

- Hit the email button to email the output to yourself for final tweaks, or just email to your client

- Your estimate auto-saves so you can finish that estimation later

This is the first release, so please give me feedback. Let me know if you like it or of you think it’s useless.