Bitcoin Forum

How much it cost and time frame needed for developing platforms like coinbase e.t.c.

Put it at 150K$ and 18 months time frame before releasing version 1.1
OR
200K$ and 12 months for an aggressive project with more high skill devs.

I'd say it depends on many factors. Development costs may be higher or smaller based on the country you're developing the platform in. For example, I suppose that the development of a Coinbase-like platform in my country (Romania) or India would require much less money than it would in Sweden or the USA.

You could probably work with Romanians or Indians from any country on such a platform too in order to minimize your costs, but I would not trust working over-the-air with some company on a serious business. Face-to-face will always be better when it comes to negotiations and business.

The best thing you can do imo is create a well-made list of features you'd like implemented and start calling or emailing different reputable companies and asking them for an approximate price (I guess it'd be +/-$10-15k) of a platform. They will probably also give you a deadline.

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Then we have these super-cheap "exchanges" and platforms you can find on the internet where you'd probably get a copycat of some exchange with lots of flaws and you just won't know where to start from without a good team behind your project. IIRC, I've seen some $50-200 exchanges for sale even here on BTCTalk. If you want something serious, that's a very bad idea. Security is the top priority for any crypto exchange imo.

On the other hand, a few months ago I was willing to create an online shop and upon calling some of my local web developers, I have received a price tag of approximately $2k for the shop. Meanwhile, I could've bought a website from a company outside my country for under $100 with even better functions and would've been much easier to manage.. (or I could've bought a $20 design license from some of the best out there and change the template based on my preferences).

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Tl;dr: it depends on too many factors so a precise answer imo cannot be given that easily.

More than you have, if you are asking that question on an Internet forum.

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It is why my above answer is not just snark:  This is how users wind up losing money.  Nowadays with rampant KYC nonsense, it is also how their dox wind up being traded on underground criminal markets.

Somebody posting on an Internet forum to price out this type of project, with no idea of what work is involved, should ipso facto not even be thinking about starting an exchange—not even dreaming about it.

A good Development and Technology discussion from two years ago:  Bad Code Has Lost $500M of Cryptocurrency in Under a Year (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2940686.0).

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I cannot resist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month):


If I budget for an aggressive pregnancy with nine highly skilled mothers, can I make a baby in one month?

At least, that is the business schedule for the prematurely released baby-1.1.0, which will be deprecated with the release of rebranded Baby 2.0.  We keep its DNA in git, so that the dev team of mothers can pull patches into their own decentralized clone repositories.

you caught my eye with the wiki link so I read it.

interesting how you interpret the article. {your pregnancy example}

 you need better coders to do it faster.
but if it is a 9 month task you can't do a good job faster.

many do say 1 madly skilled programmer will be the fastest way to do the job
same for a pregnancy 1 woman 1 womb 1 baby 9 months.

I have always found a coder that can speak to regular people in regular words does cut a shit ton of bs out of the job.

It makes sense to me. Thanks for the detailed guidance. Can you able to share more insights, detailed research from somebody, or someone's case-study? Just give me a link if you find any or PM, please.

Regards

I'd give you a merit but I keep running out of them, I don't know how some members here get to give 3-5 merits per post because I just run out of them all the time, lol.

I've been asked multiple times by some of my friends about collaborating on an exchange project, the main idea was that I'd get to do the design and the other guy would do the programming. Some people think it's all about 10 days of programming and design and you're ready to make millions. The same people then wonder why they always make the crappiest choices when it comes to buying/selling any cryptocurrency.

My biggest scare would be liability in case security isn't a hit but more of a miss. A little flaw or backdoor and you're f*cked. Moreover, if you've got not much of a history behind you, your career and life are gonna be f*cked too.

I'd rather create a very basic exchange and put 10% of my resources in design and 90% in security. Design & UI is something that can be upgradeable in time but you can't waste time when it comes to security as hackers and exploiters are not going to wait for your updates before they start their job.

Anyways, this is just a very general and simplistic overlook as planning such a project requires much more branches to think about besides security and design/UI.

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I don't really have what "insights" to share besides my attempt to work with some companies. It really depends on what features you like and the way each company prices features as they most likely do it differently.

The best thing you can do is really contacting different companies on this matter. They can give you the best ideas of what a project like you need might cost. It's like planning a house: each company will give you a different price tag and quality although you're giving them all the exact same project idea.

Good developers also need to be good communicators, otherwise they end up building the wrong product. That's true. There's a bit of a pitfall though -- good communicators don't necessarily need to be good developers. Hiring the latter can become a costly mistake as your project turns into a money sink. The tricky part is determining who's what. Without technical expertise or experience that's close to impossible.


Now, if you just want a pretty business website for your neighbourhood mom and pop shop that might be not so relevant. The stakes are low and the skills required are relatively widespread.

If you want to build an exchange on the other hand:

To be fair OP only asked about developing a platform :)

As far as operational costs are concerned you'll not only have legal costs. You'll also have accounting and customer support for example. Especially the latter is often overwhelmed even (or maybe especially) at large exchanges.

There are many whitelabel solutions so you can be up and running with a simple version in one week.

Although, your biggest problem is users and market makers (liquidity). You would need to have someone guarantee
that if a whale comes in and puts a 10mUSD order you will be able to process that.

It's not about how much it costs, you need to look at several factors... security is the main thing when it comes to wallet platform.


1) You'll need knowledge about how crypto works (creating raw transactions, signing transactions, broadcasting them, etc)

2) Fee calculations.

3) Trusted developers, they can hurt you down the line.

4) Security, you need to know a thing or two about cross-site scripting, SQL injection attacks, and password hashing algorithms.

5) The language you wish to use for your web wallet, i.e: PHP, JAVA, NODEJS, and so on...

6) You'll need to know where and how you'll store funds. Bitcoin nodes can be costly.

7) Do you want your users to have API? Callbacks, Webhooks? If so, you'll need to plan on how to execute that as well.


The timeframe you're looking at would take around 2-6 months.


I hope this helps.

I only know one blockchain dev, is called Satoshi Nakamoto and he earns 1M bitcoins from his past project, that way you have a real estimate about how much a Blockchain Dev Cost.

But getting back to reality, if you ask it to google, you will find some services who cost $30/hour for blockchain development, i think the price will be based on the coder and his skills. While more complex the project higher the price.

We have recently completed a crypto exchange software suit. I will share my experience on it. First of all, do not take it easy. It seems a basic WEB application at first but indeed there is a lot under the iceberg, it is a quite complicated system in the background actually. A well-thought-of software requirement analysis is required for a successful implementation.

I call it software suit because it contains lots of software modules; most importantly crypto wallet integration modules, order matching engine, transfer (deposit/withdrawals) management module, bank integrations modules for fiat currencies, campaign management module, referral management module, trade statistics module (for OHLC and ticker data), graphical trading WEB interface, mobile application, back office admin panel etc. With these modules (more or the less), you will have a working exchange. But without any liquidity. You should also solve the liquidity issue. There you will need an automated market making software, or you may outsource it. Additionally you may need automated arbitrage software to introduce some trade volume into your exchange.

I would not recommend using scripting languages (like php, nodejs, rubby etc.) for mission critical modules (like order matching module, crypto wallet integration modules, bank integration modules etc.) for performance and security reasons. You should consider using languages compiling to native machine code like C, C++ or Go for these services. Besides you should choice a horizontally scalable micro service architecture especially for web services and order matching module, if you don't want your services stuck on a sudden high load.

Having a well designed back office software is extremely important from the security aspect. Exchange wide hacks might be done by or helped by the employers. For example, in the back office module, you will need different roles and rights for the operators, besides you will need to log every action of the operators etc. Most probably you should pay much more attention to back office software than the user front end.

Taking account all of these, and many more I forgot to mention for the moment, you should consider not less then 24 months for a high quality professional software suit including unit/integrations test, installation and commissioning tests, etc. Development costs will be around 100K-150K USD.

Firstly you need a good trusted team and very good developers! no room for errors. I have developed a few in the past and now they are pretty much know in the crypto industry.

What you need

1. Finance in place

2. Developers starting with even 1 or 2 gradually increasing

3. Your own frame work

4. List of features what makes you different to others why would i use your service over other crypto payment providers. USP Unique selling point

5. Trusted hosting company

Now you need to decide the best route.. Crypto blockchain development for Industrial example API based for websites buying and selling or individual using to send and recieve payments.

DevCosting: from $45,000 Stage one
Building somthing like coinbase average time 9 months which is broken down in stages 3 months + 3 months R&D then another 3 months testing the waters.. Website live real time customer feed backs is very important before heavy marketing. Total 9 Months is fine.

Security Costing: $5k to $10k intial startup
Hosting nodes keeping them entirley seprate from the web application server. You can learn alot by watching IvanOnTech Youtube how important security is.

Marketing Cost $20,000 Minimum:

It all depends how fast you want to be known. cointraffic coinzilla amazing advertising platform will get you know int the market fast. before you even advertise you need to build articles build a marketing team for google keywords youtube content.

Security is very important and must never be taken so lightly and many other things to consider as the list goes on and on.