Ten answers that turn a price range into a real number.
Software quotes come back vague because the brief was vague. Answer these ten in your own words — a sentence each is enough — and any competent developer can price your project properly instead of guessing high to cover themselves. It works with this developer or with anyone else you are talking to. That is the point: a brief you can send to three people and get three comparable numbers back.
Twenty minutes, once. Most of it you already know — it has just never been written down in one place.
One email address, one email back, containing the complete template. No call, no qualification questions, no sequence afterwards. If you never reply, you never hear from us again.
Write what you want built in one sentence. Name who uses it and what it replaces.
Name the single job version one has to do. If it did only this and nothing else, would you still use it?
List every kind of person who will open it and what each is allowed to see or change. Include the ones who only look.
Name every place the data currently sits — spreadsheets, a paper file, an old system, somebody's inbox — and roughly how many rows are in each.
List each outside system it must talk to. For each one, say whether it has to be automatic or whether someone can copy and paste.
Write the sentence you will say when you know it worked. Something that starts happening, or stops happening.
List the things you have thought about and are leaving out of version one on purpose.
Give a date and say what happens on that date. If nothing happens on it, write that the timeline is flexible — and mean it.
Write the range you can actually spend, not the number you are hoping to hear.
Name the person who signs off scope and the person who signs the invoice. If they are different people, say who wins.
Send the finished brief to whoever you are considering, this developer included. If a quote comes back that ignores sections 4, 5, and 7, that tells you something useful about the quote.
