While this question is a totally understandable one, especially when you've never had a website or app made professionally before, it's also impossible to answer. There's no evading that truth, unfortunately. It's sort of like asking, "how much does a house cost?". So please provide as much detail as you can in your quote request and we'll go from there. The consultation and bidding process is free.
This depends on the nature of the website, of course, but the average time of development for any website, from the time you first message/call us to the completion/launch of the site is around 5 weeks.
You should expect an app to take roughly 3-5 times longer than its web counterpart. Just like with the cost, this is highly variable. To illustrate the high variance, the longest an app has ever taken us in terms of development cycle was 11 months. The shortest app development cycle was 2 months.
We collect payments for SEO services up-front, but all other services are billed after completion of the project to your subjective satisfaction. Special circumstances, for example rush-jobs, may warrant billing procedures being customized to your needs.
All major credit cards, checks and cash are accepted. We are also willing to accept Bitcoin and other certain forms of crypto-currency on a case-by-case basis. If you plan to use crypto-currency other than Bitcoin, please ask beforehand, as we cannot guarantee your specific currency will be accepted.
Yes and no. We will gladly take over your operations, especially if yours is a simple informational website, but in doing so we will migrate your site to a cloud provider of your choosing (like Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure). This can be wholly owned by you personally, or contained within our network. Either option is available to you and we'll suggest the right path depending on your unique circumstances.
We would not use the existing code, but you'd be surprised how easy and cost-effective it is to take over a WordPress website without actually using WordPress (or any of those other turnkey tools). So please don't hesitate to ask us about the process in spite of that fact. You don't have to change your design or rewrite your content, you can keep everything you have and get onto a more robust marketing platform at the same time.
No. Please note that Internet Explorer was killed many years ago by Microsoft, the company that made it, and that Microsoft Edge is not the same thing as Internet Explorer. We do, of course, support Microsoft Edge.
We offer hosting for all clients on Google Cloud-based servers we designed and maintain ourselves. For clients with more robust needs, or clients who are reticent to be hosted on our servers due to a bad past relationship with a developer, we can also build and maintain your sites on a cloud provider of your choosing that you own yourself. The latter is more expensive, obviously, but the option is there if you're at all concerned about ownership or mobility. The cost in either scenario is requisite to the traffic your site gets, the frequency of your updates, and the breadth of the content/media contained within the app or website. We will make any hosting fees associated with your project clear before your project begins.
For the record, most clients get charged a nominal fee of $100/year for hosting. We will tell you up-front if your scenario will play out differently.
If we see that you're taking a monumental risk in having us develop something for you, we will tell you so. This point is really only germane to app and SaaS (software as a service) development, as these are commonly taken on by clients who are private investors/entrepreneurs.
These can be hugely risky enterprises, make no mistake about it. And we are very careful with these projects.
We'll be up front with you if you're one of these clients. The rate of success in building a SaaS site or app is extremely low, but the margins when successful are generally gargantuan. We'll tell you everything up-front and make sure, ad nauseam in fact, that you understand what you're getting into.
You are a human being to us, first and foremost, and we will take great pains to ensure you're fully cognizant of the risk you're taking before we do anything for you. If that leads to a project not moving forward, we consider that a success just as much as a project that does move forward. If you do move forward in spite of our warnings, that means you're a) cognizant of the risks and b) extremely enthusiastic about the idea in a way that will serve you well when it comes time to sell it to investors and/or the public.
Yes, absolutely! We take great pride in seeing every terrible and wonderful thing ten miles down the road. That's not to say we're some kind of supremely moral batch of saints or anything like that. We do this because it's imperative for our own business purposes to stay ahead of the curve. You'll be one the beneficiaries of our proactive attitude, though. So this is a win-win situation.
We generally will not entertain the idea of working strictly for equity for a myriad of reasons. Chief among those reasons is simple math. If we use the hours that we would otherwise use to develop for a paying client on acting as your tech co-founder, we'd actually be both paying you hourly equity (because the team still has to make money and feed their families) and losing the potential hourly equity at the same time. Thereby doubling our burn-rate.
We don't have any mono-scheduled maintenance programs at Night Fox. Having said that, here is a rough idea of what to expect depending on your project's type.
Website Projects
Websites seldom require infrastructural updating or maintenance. So we wouldn't advise you bother budgeting for this. You can make any content/photo/video changes you wish within the CMS (content management system) we'll provide you when we launch your site. The only exception is for SEO projects, which we'll address a couple paragraphs below this one.
App Projects
Apps are trickier. We can't possibly anticipate fluctuations in industry-standards when it comes to apps. For example, Apple changed their form factor a few years back to include a weird "notch" at the top of the iPhone's screen. Some of our clients had to come back to us and get a bid to make their app, which was made for a different screen originally, work for the iPhone X. There was no way to know about that ahead of time, so we didn't do it for free. Minor changes like these may become necessary with your app at various points, so you shouldn't expect the same level of hands-off as you would with websites. You should always budget for random standards-changes mandated by the manufacturers and OS-providers (Google, Apple, Samsung, etc). We'll attempt to help you budget for this, but to be frank, it's an extremely nebulous task. Some clients go years without investing more in their app, some clients have to update them every week.
Here are the two core causes of the lack of apps in our public-facing portfolio:
Consumer Facing Ideas w/ No Budget
Ninety-nine out of a hundred times we get offered an app project it's by a private citizen with a consumer-facing idea. They almost always want us to take equity in lieu of payment to develop something for a market we know nothing about. We invariably say no thank you, and a good idea never goes anywhere because the person who came to us has no money to back the idea, and doesn't want to take the risk to develop the thing that only they fully understand.
Business Facing Ideas For Private Industry
Most commonly, the apps that actually get off the ground and completed are apps funded to solve an internal-facing, B2B problem. There's a simple reason for this; private companies already have the revenue sources to draw from to build the app, whereas private citizens generally do not. These are almost always apps meant to be privately installed on employees' phones or tablets. They never see the App Store, and therefore we can't showcase them, but they are apps, and we built them.
Great question. Web and app design/development is a package of emphasis, just like any other product or service. To that end, these are our priorities when making anything for a client, in order of precedence:
- Make you money/get you leads.
- Make something that's incredibly easy and intuitive to use.
- Make something that effectively communicates your service or products' value.
- Make something pretty.
Simple as that. If you're looking for aesthetics first, we're probably not the team for you. We will always sacrifice vanity for the sake of lead and revenue generation. That's not to say our work is ugly, far from it, but it's certainly not flashy/showy in a way that some prospective clients may prefer. There's obviously nothing wrong with going vanity-first in certain industries, we simply don't work in those fields because our philosophy clashes with them, those fields being things like fashion and art.
What a good looking question. Long live Kelly Kapoor.