我是一名非常优秀的iPhone应用程序开发人员，我的服务收费超过每小时150美元。我在开发iPhone应用程序及其服务器端组件方面有丰富的经验。我也曾多次被叫去修复海外开发的应用程序。以下是我的看法。

Design costs money, good design costs lots of money. Expect several designer weeks of work per app screen. Offshore teams do not do design. Server development and infrastructure is critical if the app is to succeed. A slow server response, or an overloaded server will hamper your app, and crimp sales and satisfaction. The server side of the equation will cost the most and take the most time to develop. Those who offshore their server development will find that quality and uptime are both terrible, in my experience. App development if done right takes time too. A professional developer will ensure all HIG rules are followed, the app is properly structured and contains no known errors, it performs well, and it passes the app store validations. Offshore teams just cut code.

I'm just about to release a shopping app for a client. The design work was done by 2 client in-house designers over 2 weeks, quick because they had all the image assets already. Think 2 people x 10 days x 8 hours = ~$24,000. The server side had to be modified to provide data for the iPhone app. We used their in-house team and in-house platform and in-house API, 2 developers, 4 weeks, or about $50,000 and that's because they already have a web shop and API. Cost them about $400,000 to get there (excluding platform). And I wrote the app side in 3 weeks, given that a lot of my code is duplicated from previous projects, another ~$25,000, the cheapest app I ever did.

总花费:10万美元，这真是太便宜了!

他们会免费提供，这样客户就会用iphone从他们的商店购买。

对于你的应用程序，彼得，如果你有服务器、api和设计，我猜根据复杂程度需要3万到6万美元。如果你没有设计，加倍。如果你没有api，再翻倍…

我是Twitterrific的开发者之一，老实说，我无法告诉你我在这款产品上投入了多少时间。我可以告诉你，每个人都对160个小时的开发时间和40个小时的设计时间的估算投了赞成票。(我想用另一个短语，但这是我在Stack Overflow上的第一篇文章，所以我很好。)

Twitterrific已经发布了4个主要版本，从iOS 1.0(越狱)开始。这是大量的代码，其中大部分都在位桶中(我们在每个主要版本中都进行了大量的重构)。

值得一提的是，我们在iPad版本上所投入的时间。苹果设定了产品发布日期，给了我们60天的开发时间。(后来又延长了一周。)

我们从头开始开发iPad，但我们的很多底层代码(大部分是模型)都被重用了。开发工作由两名经验丰富的iOS开发人员完成。其中一个甚至写了一本书:http://appdevmanual.com:-)

在这么短的时间里，我们工作了很长时间。保守点说，每周工作6天，每天工作10小时。9周的60小时就是540小时。如果是两名开发者，那就差不多1100个小时了。我们对客户的收费是每小时150美元，仅新代码就有165,000美元。还要记住，我们重用了一堆现有的代码:我将把代码的价值低报为3.5万美元，而总的开发成本为20万美元。

任何从事过iPhone开发的人都可以告诉你，任何项目都涉及大量的设计工作。我们有两名设计师负责这方面的工作。他们竭尽全力去处理全新的交互机制。别忘了他们也没有任何硬件可以接触(大量的打印输出!)他们每周至少花25个小时在这个项目上。所以225小时150美元/小时大约是34000美元。

还有许多开发者忽视的其他成本:项目管理、测试和设备。同样，如果我们低报16000美元，我们就会得到250000美元。这个数字与乔纳森·怀特(@schwa)对奥巴马22天应用程序的5 -15万美元估计一致。

再来一杯，伙计。

现在，如果你想为你的应用程序构建后端服务，这个数字还会上升更多。每个人似乎都很惊讶Instagram花了50万美元的风险投资来建立一个新的前端和后端。我不是。

I am an account exec at a web and mobile development company and hear this question everyday. Unfortunately, iPhone apps are not cheap. You can expect around $100 per hour if you are staying on US soil. I have seen some offshore Indian developers out there for as low as $20 per hour. It all depends on the number and complexity of the functions you wish the app to perform. Simple one function apps are normally around 4-5k. They are so expensive because you are paying a team of people a healthy hourly wage and any type of raw prototyping, development, and coding takes time. Apps can exceed 60-100k pretty easily. Southwest Airlines making an app with a full ecommerce platform that allows you to buy tickets over your phone is an example. All of that porting into their IT is a big job.

And offshoring the project is definitely not always a better option. If you do so you better know who you are dealing with. Do not get me wrong there folks over there who do a bad ass job for a way better deal, but they are not that easy to find. Those guys could fuck around for 5 months on a simple project that would take 6 weeks here, or just not complete it at all and hand it over half finished. I have seen this scenario many times where we finish the work. The project management becomes a challenge. It can be difficult to communicate exactly what you want the app to do.

以上所提到的价格是你希望支付给美国开发者的价格;然而，我确实认识一些人，他们可以通过离岸开发者以低至4000美元的价格开发自己的应用。

这是一篇来自一个组织的博客文章:http://www.lolerapps.com/why-outsourcing-iphone-apps-was-a-no-brainer-for-us

此外，卡拉·怀特写了一本很棒的电子书，讲述了她把自己的应用程序“内部秘密”外包给iPhone应用程序的过程。她谈到自己是如何得到一笔好交易的，因为她愿意与一个仍在学习iPhone应用程序开发的团队合作。

所以，除了上述开发者所讨论的高价游戏，我们还有其他选择。

我不愿意承认我做iPhone应用的成本有多低，但我可以告诉你，我不会再做了。那个说“简单，一个功能的应用程序就可以做到。”(独立开发者)……5000美元”是正确的;然而，这仍然是低数字，并且假设几乎没有项目设计，平面设计或网络后端工作。

I am the developer for Coupious mobile coupons iPhone app and with the amount of time that I spent on that application (v1.0 - v1.5), it was probably a $15,000 - $20,000 investment. However, to be fair, I do admit that I was the only developer working on it and when I started the project, I had never seen or used Objective-C before. Despite that, three months later, it was released so the numbers are probably a little skewed because there was a fair amount of learning going on as well as coding.

然而，有能力的iPhone开发者根据他们的技能和使用平台的时间在80美元至150美元之间运行。我想说，对于一个简单的应用程序，应用程序可能运行2K-5K，中等复杂度的应用程序运行5K-15K，相当复杂的应用程序运行15K-30K。游戏应用甚至更多。

之所以这么高，是因为这项技能是相当专业的，不是每个人都能做到