Somebody asked in the forum how much an app should cost that contains
— ability to shoot an image and send it to the owner of the app
— let the owner send push notifications to remind users to buy something from him.
Here’s my answer:
I’m an active developer for both Android and iOS so here is how I go about charging my customers. One is to get paid monthly for a fixed sum and endure that until the app is published to the store. Another way is per screen and each screen has a certain value, say $100 or whatever we agree upon. Some screens are very easy to code, some take weeks so in the end it all levels out. Yet another way is per hour which works for small projects.
What you really pay is the amount of time I dedicate to your project including writing and answering your emails, being there for technical support and so on. Sometimes coding time is minimal and the time spent is mostly on communicating via email or Skype. A client of mine I worked for a year with, we exchanged almost 700 messages over several projects.
Camera for iOS I did that already and that is not a problem. Apple revamped notifications with iOS 10 so you’d need new code to alleviate that. Finally, you ask for a server based solution for sending notifications which is the hard part. You’d really have to know why are you investing in developing new software when you can send lots and lots of notifications through sites such as Mixpanel, Localytics, Leanplum, Urban Airship, Appboy, Herable, Outbound, Kahuna, Parse… and there are others.
Finally, are you ready to contact a developer? Do you have a wireframe of the product to be, or maybe a working app into which the new solution would have to integrate in, do you have a complete project with all the transactions detailed (“this button does that”) and so on. Unless I am working on my own app, I work best (and that may well be the case with many other developers) when given a blueprint to follow.