Develop Computing Technologies

How Much Does It Cost To Develop an AI Prototype?

A basic AI chatbot prototype that enables conversations with your data can be built in just a few days. Most of the effort involves scoping, managing expectations, defining success criteria and test data, locating and accessing the data, and prompt engineering.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Minimal Software Product?

100 K and 9 months. Typically, you would start with a single developer, which realistically costs around 100K for 9 months. It usually takes 9 months to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with some marketable functionality. Larger teams and extended timelines are required for bigger solutions, but creating anything meaningful for less than that is very challenging.

Can a Small Vendor Do Much?

Yes, many successful products are created by very small teams, often consisting of just a single developer. Some even predict that one-person billion-dollar companies will emerge in the coming years.

Can AI Replace Developers?

AI is unlikely to replace developers but will expand the range of programs that are feasible to create. Software development is an ongoing process of commoditization: common programming tasks are rapidly standardized into reusable libraries. Developers combine these commodity blocks to deliver unique, non-commodity functionality, often writing less than 1% of the final program code.

AI lowers the threshold for when a task becomes a commodity. For example, it can now create a fully functional chat window supporting complex interactions — something that required custom coding just a year ago.

For the foreseeable future, human developers will still be needed for conceptual or highly interconnected tasks.

Do I Need a Cloud Partner to Develop a Cloud Solution?

Affiliated partners generally have greater ability to build large teams of cloud professionals compared to independent vendors. However, small products often require fewer developers (one or two), fewer cloud technologies, and lower budgets. For these cases, independent vendors can often provide better value.

How Big Should My Technology Vendor Be?

Your vendor should be comparable to your own size. Your projects should be significant to the vendor.

Do Developers Have Equal Skills?

Two developers with similar experience levels may differ in productivity by a factor of ten or more. Such differences are far greater than what is seen in most other industries.

One developer may be innovative but constantly experimenting, while another might be more cautious but focused. Ultimately, success requires aligning the developer's strengths and interests with the project’s needs — a match that is not always easy to achieve.

How Much Does a Developer Cost

In The Netherlands, a mid-career developer typically costs between €60 and €120 per hour as a freelancer, or €80K to €150K annually as an employee. Vendors and intermediaries often add a margin on top of that. While rates should fall within this range, they do not directly correlate with performance or outcomes.

Java, Node, or Python

A decade ago, Java dominated business applications, but the landscape has evolved. Node.js (JavaScript) is now widely adopted for building versatile software systems, especially cloud solutions. Python is becoming a standard in data science, AI, and machine learning.

JavaScript supports a highly efficient development model suited for rapid prototyping and production-ready solutions. It is one of the most effective technologies for accelerated development today. This model relies on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for data serialization, stored in cloud-native NoSQL databases like DynamoDB on AWS. Data objects are processed by JavaScript programs running on servers with Node.js and in client browsers. Professional user interfaces are efficiently built using React and Material-UI (MUI) libraries. When deployed on pay-as-you-go serverless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda or GCP Cloud Functions), these solutions become scalable, reliable, and cost-effective.

Combined, this forms a cohesive full-stack development ecosystem based on a single technology, delivering exceptional efficiency.

Python is widely used for data-driven prototyping and development. Its main advantage lies in its ability to call libraries written in other programming languages, such as high-performance C++ programs running on servers with minimal overhead. Python accelerates data experimentation using libraries like pandas and numpy, paired with advanced data visualization tools.

Python is also the primary choice for creating machine-learning solutions and is the preferred language of the global AI community.

How To Find a Good Vendor

That’s simple — just contact BISOT Advies.