Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k

Posted by samzenpus on from the money-well-spent dept.

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Summary can't add by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Informative

    The iPhone version was $56,000. The Blackberry version was $40,000. Together, they were $96,000. It says this very clearly in the original scan.

    --
    Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
  2. This sounds like an article by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Informative

    By someone that's never written anything more complex than an Excel Macro. Programming is hard. I mean that. I've written some applications myself, and making it reliable (which is kinda the point for something like this) and useful is not that simple. $200k for a professionally built application that runs on reliable on 3 platforms isn't that much. In programming, everything is always harder than you thought it was going to be.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  3. Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper by sosume · · Score: 4, Informative

    No. A regular team will set you back around $100k a month: 7 people ($100/hr) just cost 5K daily. That gives you 2 developers, one system engineer, one designer, two testers and one project manager. Two sprints and you've spent the budget.