DEV Community

Discussion on: How do you estimate/calculate costs of new features for clients?

Collapse
 
pyrsmk profile image
Aurélien Delogu

I think the best way would be to estimate the feature, ask 30% of it, and reevaluate the real cost at the end of the future and bill the rest. The idea would be also to incremental by implementing small to medium features instead of a big one. The client keeps an eye on how it goes, and the developer/company is payed regularly.

But nowadays clients are more accustomed to have a big estimation of the project, so: the developer is losing money because the project has been wrongly estimated, or the client is losing money because the developer has added a big margin to avoid losing money.

Anyway, when I need to estimate, I chop it quickly into features and try to estimate easy one in half days. I don't want to pass to much time on it so to avoid losing time and money on something that have a big uncertainty factor (client acceptance, unplanned changes or issues,...). I also add some margin if I feel the need to.

Collapse
 
nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Cheers! The first approach sound quite interesting, I doubt we could do it in this way at our company, as many times clients have to ask for funding to goverments or organizations, and must cover the whole development.