The hidden cost
of software development

You build your own home to stop paying rent. You realized that you have extra budget to fancy it up a little bit and add a pool. But you forgot to calculate that you have to pay utilities, tax, maintenance and so on. The same thing happens in technology. The cost of building a feature is only a fraction of the total cost of ownership. In the real world, this feature will break, it will get slow, it will have security flaws, and it will cost too much infrastructure.

You aren't worried, you can always fix them, because code is text, and text is modifiable. Well, as it happens when you own a house, renovation is much more expensive than building, because there are people living there, and if you change a wall in a room, it may impact another room. The same goes for software, you have users and interdependency, so renovations are much more expensive. You realized that you got stuck with technical debt bigger than you can deal with it.

To put it into perspective, only to maintain this one feature of autocomplete, Google has a team of 25 engineers that work full-time and receive a U$ 300,000/year on average.

Behind this interface, there is a complex infrastructure that needs to index all searches all over the world and reply very quickly and efficiently because it is a free service. This huge structure is complex and needs constant maintenance.

Don't bite off
more than you can chew

Big Tech

Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Amazon, Dropbox, AirBnb, Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Shopify, Stripe, Twilio can work on innovation with state-of-art products. Not because it requires an army to build it, but it requires an army to maintain it.

They normally target the B2C market because they can provide premium user experience and they can handle the complexity it creates.

Examples: Uber App, AirBnb App, Netflix App, Banking App, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Windows, Mac OS

Modular architecture — If you want to allow interaction in the browser, to send multiple inputs and to receive outputs asynchronously while the user continues the navigation, you'll need multiple small modules that only process the interaction and respond quickly. This is the microservice (or modular) architecture. This is only required when latency is critical.

Graphical representation of 100 engineers for Medium Companies

Medium Business

It may sound feasible for 100 engineers to build an app just like Uber, because a layman can't see the hidden cost. But, if this would be possible, why would Uber have so many engineers? To be successful, a medium business needs to simplify the idea of their product.

They normally target the B2B market because whoever makes the hire decision (finance department) is not the same person who uses the system (collaborators).

Examples: School time-table automatic planning, Route automatic planning, Finance optimization, Civil engineering simulator

Clean architecture — If you want the user experience to allow interaction in the browser, to accumulate multiple inputs and to send it nested, the server will have to unpack it, process it, and pack it again. This is a 7-layer Clean Architecture. This is only required when processing interdependent constraints.

Graphical representation of 5 engineers for Small Companies

Small Business

5 engineers seem a lot until you start to put in perspective with Big Techs. If a Big Tech needs thousands of engineers to maintain their applications, a small company needs to constrain its system big time to be able to maintain it.

They normally target internal tools for its own clients and collaborators for very niche requirements, unique to that company, so there are no competitors. They may integrate with Medium Business and Big Tech API or tools to augment their features without the burden of maintaining it.

Examples: Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence

MVC architecture — If you can design the user experience to be an incremental navigation where the user fills out a flat form, submit, the server processes the request and sends a response that may be another form, you only need a 3-layer architecture called MVC.

From idea to product

Bill Gates states in his autobiography that people who have ideas normally are not so good at transforming these ideas into a concrete thing. Creative people allow themselves to think outside the box, and it is precisely this that lets them solve problems that most people can't.

But, the real world is messy. Analytical people, on the other hand, limit themselves to avoid complexity, because complexity often fails in the real world. It is precisely the interaction between creative people and analytical people that create polished versions of the solution that are simpler and affordable.

Why 70% of SMB shortfalldigitalization?

The hidden cost of software development