Looking to develop a chat application, curious about the costs involved

I'm in the process of putting together a chat application for iOS. I've just about designed the whole thing front to back, but I myself am no programmer. As such I'm looking to hire one or two really strong developers, but I don't know what the costs involved will be like.

I'm thinking of pursuing Kickstarter so that I can afford to hire a strong developer, but I have no clue as to how much that might cost.

I guess my question is, what's a pretty reasonable ballpark figure (i.e. $10,000 for 3 months of work) that would go a long way for me on Kickstarter? Any feedback and insight into this industry is well appreciated, since my knowledge of development costs is basically zero.

Thanks again!

It's very hard to guesstimate what development costs might be since it depends on the complexity of what you are trying to do and the features you want to put together.

Assuming you want to create a iOS client, that's one project and the second one is the server backend to handle all the traffic. You then need to worry about hosting/managing the backend to provide the service to begin with.

Any consulting developer worth his/her salt will run in the $150/hr rate..so with a 8 hour day, you're looking at about 6k for a weeks work. Maybe you can find someone cheaper..say $100/hr and that'll drop you down to 4k for the week. If you're thinking it'll take 3 months to do the work, that's approx. 480 hours and either 48k or 72k depending on the rate..

Before starting anything off, you might want to hire a developer just for a "discovery" phase and have them plan out the entire project down to the individual tasks, and based on that you can figure out how long it will realistically take to get the work done. The money you need then will just be a matter of multiple the total hours with the rate you are comfortable with..

Good luck..