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Comment by poof | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to build a product like autodesk's flame but a bit different. They sell this for $300k/unit, so i'm wondering how much it actually cost them to make it.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...

Edit: To elaborate, flame is pretty much like an adobe after effects + premiere hybrid.

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Whoof. I support any effort that competes with AutoDesk -- they're an abysmal company that go out of their way to encourage people to compete with them -- but you're picking quite an ambitious project here.

If you want to produce a closed-source product, your programmers will be somewhat limited in the various open source projects that they can use as an effective foundation for this.

I'd say, purely from a software development standpoint, to produce a version 1.0 of something that might have a chance of competing with Flame, you're gonna need: a good UI guy, a brilliant 3D hacker, a pretty sharp math guy (fortunately they're cheap these days :-), a good programmer, and an experienced project manager with some respectable coding chops just to keep the project moving along. So, say a minimum of $250k combined yearly salaries. If you're a strong businessman, and if you get the right team together, you might be able to get a beta released in 12 months.

That estimate is high or low depending on how much higher or lower your goals are in terms of a first release, but it should be kind of ballpark.

Thanks for the estimate. I figured it would take a team of 50 programmers @ $100k/yr salary 2 years to complete it (which is how long i want to give it), which would equal a total cost of $10m, which i imagine would be reasonable considering it wouldnt take much to recoup.

Seriously, it would only take like 5 people to write a program like flame from scratch?

Well, you can do it with only 1. But it would him/her several years and a LOT of effort. I think parent was saying that to get a "functional" team, a minimum of 5 would be needed.

Even with the 5 people, I think the estimate of 1 year is a bit extreme. Unless you get brilliant programmers that can work together really well, I'd imagine they would need more time than that.

I don't know what the product is, but to be able to compete with a mature product(even a bad one) takes a lot of time and energy. It all depends on what you want version 1.0 to do.

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