Member Avatar for eliy

Hi everyone,

I'm curious, and I would like to know how much may it cost to build a software more or less similar to the one used for Badoo or Person.com social networks? How much approximate time may it take to build?

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Short summary for (and expanding on ’s points): there’s no single price — expect a very wide band depending on features, team and geography. A lean social/dating MVP (registration, profiles, photo upload, feeds/basic chat, admin) commonly runs from roughly $15k–$150k; a full product with real‑time chat/video, heavy matching/ML, payments, moderation and analytics can be $150k–$1M+. Typical MVP build time is often 3–6 months; full platforms commonly take closer to 9–18 months. (goodfirms.co)

Practical way to budget: decide the exact MVP feature set first (login, profiles, media storage, simple feed/search, one chat channel, admin dashboard). Typical small team = 1–2 backend, 1 front-end/mobile, 1 UI/UX, 1 QA and a PM/designer depending on scope; hourly rates vary a lot by region (US/Western Europe highest, Eastern Europe/LatAm mid, South Asia lowest), so the same feature set can cost a few× less with an offshore team. Use those regional rate bands when converting hours to dollars. (booleaninc.com)

Operational and ongoing costs you must budget separately: hosting, CDN, media storage, SMS/push, monitoring, and incident response. Cheap VPS/Cloud plans can start at ~$5–$40/month (DigitalOcean, small instances) and PaaS options (Heroku) start at low monthly dyno prices, but real usage — media, push, and scaling — commonly pushes costs into hundreds or thousands per month as users grow. Plan annual maintenance as a recurring line (many references use ~15–25% of initial dev cost/year). Use a cloud pricing calculator for a tailored estimate. (polyguides.com)

Non‑technical costs that break many budgets: trust & safety/moderation, fraud prevention, legal/privacy (GDPR/CCPA if you handle EU/CA personal data), and user acquisition/marketing. Start narrow: build the smallest set that tests core demand, instrument metrics for retention, and iterate — that reduces wasted spend and avoids premature complexity. (trade.gov)

Short checklist missing from earlier replies: lock your MVP feature list, choose web‑first vs native, pick a team model (in‑house/agency/freelance), size a staging+prod hosting plan and add a 15–25% yearly maintenance buffer.

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Member Avatar for milil

It depends on many factors.
1. Programing language, for different languages you need to pay different hostings rates.
Example: for development in PHP are lower hourly rates then in Java.
Note: chosing language is always tricky thing because all changes and updates and "power" of your site depends on that.
2. Design. If you want this to work you need very good design, that involves designe for all platforms so it takes good amount of time so you will pay good money there too.
3. Functionality. How many functions your website will have are thry going to be the same or you will change them.
4. Metodology of work. There are many metodologies in development and it depends on that too.
5. Country. You may ask how the hell county take in count, it counts and that is main thing. Developers in different countries have different standards of life and if you pick somebody from USA or India price will be different. And difference is realy big.
6. Experience. Different developers/designers have different experience so if you hire somebody with more experience you will pay more.

That is my point of view in developing system that you need to take into count.
If you want my estimation for time and money you can ask me in PM.
Regards, Mike.

Member Avatar for eliy

Thank you Milil for your explanations.

commented: np +3
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