I am starting an independent project to adapt one of my original stories to the iPad. So far I can do everything form art/animation to front-end design, but will require an iOS programmer to provide some extra muscle since it is an interactive e-book (chose your own adventure). Unfortunately I cannot say much about the project at this point beyond that it should fall somewhere between 30-50 pages. I am not recruiting yet as our funding has yet to be secured, but if/when I do I'd like to have an idea as to how much an iOS programmer would charge. So,

How much (ballpark) would you (programmer) ask for to developing an interactive e-book app for the iPad 4?

I may be completely off base here, having never contracted this sort of work, but I think $100 per hour is not uncommon. Things will vary of course, depending on the circumstances, so you might get away with less.

The real question then becomes how many hours would it take to create this app. That, I cannot answer, as I am notoriously inept at guessing how long development would take. At any rate, I would expect the price to work out to at least $1500, possibly more or less depending on precisely what you want.

This is all based on my somewhat short experience working for a company that does contract work (I don't see the actual contracts, but I've been told that we typically negotiate about $100 per hour and make estimates based on that). I never see that sort of money, of course. If I was contracting the work myself, I'd probably charge less to give myself an edge over established development studios who can leverage higher prices.

Contract work should be mostly lump sum. At least that's how I'd do it. If you write up your design you can just get quotes and then you'll know exactly how much it would cost you. It varies from developer to developer.

put it up on rent a coder and you could probably get it done for 25 cents

edit: I don't advise that you do that though.

I am starting an independent project to adapt one of my original stories to the iPad. So far I can do everything form art/animation to front-end design, but will require an iOS programmer to provide some extra muscle since it is an interactive e-book (chose your own adventure). Unfortunately I cannot say much about the project at this point beyond that it should fall somewhere between 30-50 pages. I am not recruiting yet as our funding has yet to be secured, but if/when I do I'd like to have an idea as to how much an iOS programmer would charge. So,

How much (ballpark) would you (programmer) ask for to developing an interactive e-book app for the iPad 4?

Depends on lots of factors.

Where is the person or group located? What is their level of experience? What resources will they be committing? What is the size and scope of the project?

Common contracts could be anywhere from $75-$150 per human hour of work. That assumes you want professional quality work.

If you want the random quality work of a college student or hobby worker, you may get lucky but generally do not.

Let's assume this is how your contract work comes out:

Lets assume an estimate of 2 people (programmer+art) for a week to refine and prototype your ideas, plus 4 people for three weeks to implement the details, plus some QA time, and another week fixing and testing all the things you failed to specify, that's around 700 hours for a very basic simple product. Or about $70000 from a solid professional contract shop.



If you shop around, you might find a company that has already done similar stuff, and can put together a contract that requires non-compete but non-exclusive code use for less money.

Or you can negotiate that they charge you much less and have a contract with nothing about competition or exclusivity, but expect that group to put it on the app store and gain an instant competitor.



Yes, custom software development is expensive. People are used to cheap software because the cost is spread among a few million people.

While I am not familiar with the iOS platform, I would imagine that an interactive e-book would include a lot of boilerplate code on the programming side, as almost all content would come in the form of the art, animation and scripting. Could you possibly use an off the shelf or even open source framework ? In this case the programmer would merely be writing the scripts, while you would be providing the bulk of the work. Which would tremendously cut down on the development time and costs.

Thanks for all of the feedback, it is much appreciated!

Yann,
I am going to kick off with Xcode and whatever tools are freely available to me through Apple's website. I have solid experience in tools like After Effects and Flash, so it is my hope that I can hit the ground running once I get set-up.

I would strongly recommend starting out with Xcode 4+ if possible (4.0 if you have Snow Leopard, 4.1 if you have Lion) since the iOS publishing and Interface Builder are light years ahead of Xcode 3.6. I believe both are available on the mac app store now and 4.1 is free if you have Lion. Xcode should really be the only development tool you need for making simple iOS apps and you should be able to test most of, if not all the functionality in the iOS simulator without having to pay the $100/yr for a developer license until you're getting close to being ready to publish.

I wish you the best of luck. Objective c isn't the easiest of languages for starting out development, but it sounds like the actual coding you'll need is rather small and most of what you're trying to accomplish can be done in Interface Builder, so you might be able to limp along without a developer especially if you've messed around with ActionScript in Flash.