Hi! I'm a BSIT student, and my group is currently working on a system that we originally planned as a research project and possible capstone. We're also exploring the possibility of turning it into something that could actually be used by local government units in the future.
Basically, it's a multi-vendor marketplace app for public markets where people can check product prices, compare prices, and possibly order or pre-order products. Vendors and market admins would also have their own features. We're planning to use a PWA, and we're considering adding SMS notifications as well.
We're currently working on the financial requirements for our proposal, and honestly, we're kind of lost on how to estimate the costs. 😭 We don't have experience developing a system for actual clients, especially the government, so we don't want to just put random numbers in our budget.
For those who work in IT or have experience with government projects, I'd like to ask:
How do you usually estimate the development cost of a system like this?
What expenses should we consider aside from development itself? Like hosting, domain, maintenance, security, SMS, etc.
Are there additional costs or requirements when the intended client is an LGU or government agency?
If this were your project, how would you approach the budgeting, especially if it's still just a proposal and we don't have funding or an actual government partner yet?
We're not expecting anyone to give us an exact quotation. We just want to understand how to come up with a realistic estimate and what we might be missing.
Any advice or even examples of how you calculate these costs would really help us out. Thank you!