How much web developers charge for social networking website?

[pratik d]

I am planning to create social networking website like facebook.
Please any one tell me if I hire freelancers or professional companies, how much do they charge?
Give rough idea for both of them.
Also, If I hire web developers from India or China, how much it will cost me?

[prashu132]

It depends on the features that you needed... I'm a free lancer coder.... but cost varies as per functionalities......... if you need to make a rich and full fledged website like facebook it may cost a bit higher... by the way you can start with a small scale app...... Cost also depends on user traffic range u needed...

[WaMSie]

There's a blog entry below that estimates in 2007 Facebook's cost per year to be $24,000,000, most of which is staffing costs.

Shunting work offshore increases domestic management costs and does not work if innovative work needs to be done. Tasks suitable for offshore work tend to be well defined tasks, such as converting an existing system from one platform to another. I suspect it would not reduce your costs.

[Web Head]

From India, if you hire an outsource company, expect to pay $8 to 10 per hour.
If you hire an individual from India, expect to pay $4 to $6 per hour.
Expect it to take twice as long and be half as good. I have no experience with IT from China, but I can tell you that if my experience from India IT is any clue, the people that do web design for outsource companies in India get about $4/hr and if they were in America, they would still only be worth $4/hr. (I warned you)

Expect to pay anyone in the USA $2000+ depending on features. This is a "getting started" price for basic Facebook functionality.
Expect that coming close to what you get from Facebook will take a very long time and probably cost over $6000++ when the details are finished.
You could easily pay over $50,000 depending on who you hire and what the project details are.

[Miss M]

It depends on the specifications you are looking for and if the developer needs to code everything from scratch or can extend a script that has already been written.