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Kamal Fariz Mahyuddin on Ruby, Rails, Apple and being a Dad.

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Breaking Down HashRocket's 3-2-1 Launch Price Structure

A week ago, HashRocket shook the Rails consulting world by storm with a unique offering called 3-2-1 Launch in which they will launch your app in three days for USD$30,000. Obie has since given more details on how they operate 3-2-1 Launch, such as the number of developers dedicated to each project and the pre-implementation lead time. This post aims to estimate how much all this breaks down to in terms of rate per hour, and if it’s a good bang-for-your-buck deal.

Let’s estimate the hours spent on a typical project, based on details given by Obie.

  1. Lead time of three weeks for User Stories and High-fidelity mockups. I estimate two people are dedicated to this task, a designer and a developer.

    Lead Time Hours: 40 hrs x 3 weeks x 2 people = 240 hrs

  2. Three days of implementation with 4-6 developers (paired)

    4 developers: 8 hrs x 3 days x 4 people = 96 hrs

    6 developers: 8 hrs x 3 days x 6 people = 144 hrs

  3. So, the total hours hours on a project will be in the range of 336-384 hours.

Now, let’s divide this up by $30,000 to get the effective rate per hour

4 developers: 30,000 / 336 =~ $90/hr

6 developers: 30,000 / 384 =~ $78/hr

This gives us the estimated consulting rates of around $78-90 per hour. This is a pretty standard rate for an experienced Rails developer. Suddenly, the $30,000 price tag doesn’t seem like a lot. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! They throw in other value added services like client mentoring, deployment and post-production. Based on these factors, I think 3-2-1 Launch offers a pretty good bang for the buck.

However, there are still some questions unanswered by the post. For example, how long is their post-production support for? What is in the scope of post-production - monitoring, bug fixes, small enhancements? Are hosting fees for Amazon EC2 and S3 part of the $30k (I doubt it)? Do the clients receive the full source code (most probably)? Additionally, what will the cost model be if the client wants to take the app past 1.0 (I know for a fact that traditional consulting makes a killing in Change Requests)?

All in all, HashRocket is a pretty cool concept and I’m sure many will follow suit to offer similar products.

Disclaimer: Obie and I are Rails Rumble 2007 alumni (my team’s entry was Redux), so I can definitely connect with the 48-hour rush feeling. Unlike Obie, I swear not to do it ever again. Apart from that, I don’t know Obie personally.