How to hire a freelance

Hey there,

In these days the mobile world is exploding and it's very popular, tons of people are willing to create their awesome apps or games ideas, so freelances are more needed than ever.

But do you know about outsourcing and software costs?

Software is one of the MOST EXPENSIVE things out there, it doesn't matter if you want to create an app or a game, it will cost you A LOT of money, usually a simply and crappy non-polished app starts at 1000$, but never mind, let's start with some basic advice to help you :)

First, as an example you are a guy living in the US, and for this example you are living in California to be more specific. You decided to create an app/game and you need someone to do it, so your first AND MORE IMPORTANT step is to contact companies/freelances IN YOUR AREA, so contact 5 companies/freelances and get quotes from all of them.

For this example let's say that you want to create a game, a temple run clone for iOS, which is a popular game and of course you want to add your twist to it, so you've contacted a bunch of companies in your city and you got quotes from 50.000$ to 100.000$ for such game, you see a different range of prices based on the quality and expertise of those companies.
Now you could be thinking, wow that's a hell lot of money, yes, it is, but this what it cost a real quality and polished game (and much more than that).

So in order to save you some bucks you can hire a freelance of outside US and get the benefits of outsourcing, but be careful here, outsourcing doesn't mean that you will find someone to create that game for 2000$, outsourcing means that you will be able to find a company/freelance that can offer you a quote up to a 50% lower of the original US price, but be careful, the percentage depends on the country of the freelance, a lot of countries in Europe are almost as expensive as the US and you won't get ANY reduction at all.
Assuming you are contacting someone living in a "low cost country", then a realistic quote (expecting a decent and polished game) will be something between 20.000$ and 50.000$ for such game.
Thanks to the low cost living conditions of some countries you can save up to a 50% which is very nice, right?
But once again, be careful, the prices depends entirely on the country of the freelance/company, you WON'T get the same price contacting a company/freelance in London than a company/freelance in India or China,etc,etc.

Remember the more important detail,  you get what you pay for, aim too low and don't get surprised if your game/app is just a piece of crap.

Have fun, Alex

Source : eskemagames[dot]blogspot[dot]com