If I’d had 1 more senior developer and a designer/front-end dev, I’m fairly certain it could be done by now.
But there’s so many people involved in the process that everything slows to a crawl.
I’m sure our clients love hearing that the product is developed by 30 people over 1.5 years though.
Fancy juggling AWS config and costs? Writing user manuals, help desk scripts?
On a scratch-itch OSS project you can ignore those. But when you plan to sell it, things scale quickly. Coding is just one arrow in quivver.
But the point was mainly that the actual product is essentially a glorified crud application.
There is some value in having a larger team, but the time wasted is absolutely massive.
A couple of ambitious college students could make a basic web crawler and search engine using 2018 technology and not even that many cloud resources and get like 80% of Google's quality. But that doesn't mean they're only another long weekend from being the next Google: closing the gap really does require millions of manhours and billions of dollars of compute.
(And their web crawler would be causing chaos and destruction across the web, but let he who has not accidentally deleted someone's will by crawling all the "delete this article" links cast the first stone.)
In my area, we've literally built something more or less like that a few times in the same time with one or two developers each time. In fact, I found out after the demo that much of the core logic came from a repo a guy on my team wrote in his spare time to plug a hole on a minor side project he was doing.