How We Built an iPhone App for $4873.92
In this technical retrospective (2008), @madmotive shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 26 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 19 comments
I'm the author of this blog post, and I thought I'd respond to a few valid points that have been brought up here:
- The reason I wrote about and actually itemized cost is because, well, you don't see much of that at the moment. People like Paul Graham say that a startup can be funded with $20000, but what does that really mean? What's the nitty-gritty?
- I didn't include things like pencils and chairs because everyone has pencils and chairs. I wanted to touch on what and where we had to spend to get this particular app going. Your results may vary; surely if you're doing a game you'd probably need more art assets, etc. The point is not that oh, we did this for so little money, we're so great - it's a personal story of how _we_ built an app, and to embolden others that hey, it's doable. That's why I linked to the Guy Kawasaki post at top of this article - it inspired us!
- TX is probably trolling, but I have to dispute the idea that linux kernel devs don't share their experience. Sure they do: it's in their well-written code and comments. We're closed source, but my partner will be posting about technical issues and speed wins for iPhone development soon, and there will be more to follow when the iPhone NDA lifts. Our app may seem simple, but if you could open it up you'd find an elegant tourbillon - it wasn't thrown together in the slightest.
I'm sorry - but is this a joke?
Out of the 11 items they brought, $4873.92 overall, 8 of them, $4136.94, seems like totally unessential.
I was expecting something where the bulk of the costs consisted of salaries for X days/weeks of work. But instead the bulk consisted of a trip to the WWDC, tons of ram, and icons?
Maybe this wasn't the point of the post, but it seems like they totally missed the point of building an application...or at least the point of a "How we built X for $Y" post. But it seems every single one of those posts are totally inaccurate - one where they built one for $10k (but had 9 people working on the project!), one where they built a site for $8.75 (because that's the cost of the domain - nothing else included), and now this where they built one for $5000 (but included totally unnecessary items).
$297.98 - Emergency RAM. For a while we had to parse a 12gb XML file. Every day. Louis got 8 more gigs for his Mac Pro overnighted out.
I'd really like to know what the hell this 12GB XML file they needed to parse multiple times was.
EDIT: The developer replied here: http://gifterapp.disqus.com/how_we_built_an_iphone_app_for_487392_none_gifter/#comment-892510* ↗
I think it was a pretty good article. If you think an item was unessential, well, you can do the math, subtract it. It was a pretty good round-up of how they did it. You may make fun of the icons, but a lot of businesses outsource these days, and they decided to outsource that. If it was something that would just have delayed them, then it was the right choice. And it illustrates just how cheaply it would be to outsource that sort of thing.
I have to congratulate these developers for creating what appears to be a very useful iPhone app on a shoestring with lots of sweat equity.
However, when it comes down to how much it cost, like jrockway said, it's not very meaningful to others. Furthermore, I'm already sick of the prospect of the pissing contest where developers say they can develop another app for even less. Blech.