Please read I have a simple app I’d like you to develop… to gain a basic understanding of some of the many factors we have to consider in developing an application.

If you read that entry in its entirety, you’ll understand that even the simplest of apps can be quite involved. Given that everything from graphics, layout, content, Internet functionality, number of screens,and so on have to be considered, in addition to other factors that will have to be considered that will come up during the course of normal application development, even a very basic iPhone application might take somewhere around 3-5 hours to complete and test … and that’s leaving out all the time spent in communicating back and forth with the client to figure out the scope of the project and to nail down the exact feature set required.

Even then, we often find that once the application is complete, the client wants a different look, or wants to modify a feature, or wants it to work like “this other app that I saw”, etc. This means further work which was not included into the original scope of the project.

So, at the bare minimum, we would have to charge around $500 to make developing even the simplest, single-screen app which displays a couple of lines of text and does some other stuff, worth our while. And that’s why we can’t do “simple” apps for $100-300 …