What Goes Into Development Costs

Discovery (10–15%)

Diving into the task, gathering requirements, prototyping. This is the most important part. If you skip it, you'll overpay in development by 2x.

Design (10–20%)

From sketches to approved design, design system, components. Good design is not beauty; it's understanding the user.

Development (50–60%)

Frontend, backend, integrations, tests. The biggest line item. Quality matters here: a junior takes 10 hours, a senior takes 2 hours on the same task.

QA and testing (10–15%)

Autotests, manual testing, bug fixes. You can't cut corners here — it gets more expensive in support.

Infrastructure and DevOps (5–10%)

Servers, CI/CD, monitoring, backups. If you don't set it up right from the start, reworking it later is pricey.

Questions

Can I cut costs somewhere?

You can. But every cut has a price. Skip discovery — redo development. Skip QA — pay in support.

Why so many different estimates?

Team experience (junior vs senior), tech stack, task complexity. There's no cheap place; there are just quality cuts.

How do I know an estimate is fair?

A good estimate breaks down hours per line item, not just a number. It's okay if it grows during the process — it's bad when they hide where it came from.