Hi HackerNews, I'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's possible. I don't study computer science for now, so no teacher could answer me and that's why I'm asking to you.
How much would this 3D Solar Power Plant simulator cost if a company needed to pay for it?
If it's impossible to answer, I'm also interested in understanding why.<p>Here is my work : https://www.husnet.fr/quentin/SolarPowerPlant/<p>Here more precision : it's a solar power plant simulator library that gives the potential power generated by the plant, according to a lot of parameters : mirrors' geometry, sun position, latitude,... It's in Javascript and works thanks to ThreeJS.<p>Thanks a lot.
Don't charge by the day! Your costs have nothing to do with how much it's worth to a customer.<p>Talk to companies that might be target market. Figure out how much it would save them.<p>1. Nothing. But maybe you can use feedback to improve the product so it is worth something to them.<p>2. It saves them $10000 a year. You can't charge $25,000.<p>3. It saves them $5000000 a year. You can charge more than $25000.
<i>How much would this 3D Solar Power Plant simulator cost if a company needed to pay for it?</i><p>I reckon 25 days is a fair estimate. That breaks down to;<p>1 day to research sun position, azimuth, etc.<p>2 days to figure out the various bits of maths involved and write code to do the calculations.<p>4 days to build a working interactive 3D model.<p>2 days to build the charts and tables.<p>5 days for a designer to make a great layout, build assets, etc.<p>6 days to bring everything together in a website that works across different browsers.<p>3 days for device testing.<p>2 days to cover meetings, phone calls, etc.<p>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.<p>$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 <i>really</i> cheap. I know of agencies that would charge 10* that if they thought the client could afford it.