So you have decided to order a Web App from a web development agency (or you might have already made an order). You are a client, and nobody expects you to know all the intricacies of the process. But knowing who is who in a Web development team that is in charge of your project can be really helpful for your further communication.
With a set of 3 articles, I will try to explain Web Development in a nutshell for newcomers:
- Outsourcing models;
- Web development team structure: roles and responsibilities;
- Expenses on Tools and IT infrastructure during the development stage.
Expenses on tools and IT infrastructure during the development stage
When you start a web development project for the first time, you may ask yourself what other direct development costs are possible. Even though they are usually not big, understanding their structure will bring you peace of mind. Here, I prepared a monthly cost structure for an average team of up to 10 team members.
| IT Infrastructure expenses | Subscription fee | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|
| LaSoft expenses | ||
| Jira Software Tool for tasks and bug development | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Invision InVision is the digital product design platform used to make the world's best customer experiences. | $25.00 | $25.00 |
| Zeplin Connected space for product teams. Handoff designs and styleguides with accurate specs, assets, code snippets—automatically. | $19.00 | $19.00 |
| Flowmap Online tool for creating a sitemap, user flow and personas that help you to effectively design and plan best UX. | $12.75 | $12.75 |
| $66.75 | ||
| Client's expenses | ||
| Server infrastructure Development, Staging and Production servers on Heroku. Initially, during the development stage, we do not plan a high-load, and we will need two instances. Each instance will cost $7 each. | $14.00 | $14.00 |
| CircleCI CI/CD tool, trial version for the 1st month | $30.00 | $30.00 |
| Auth0 Auth0 authentication plugin. Auth0 has a free plan, we plan to use it at this point. Later it is possible that we will need to from free to developer plan which will cost $23/month | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| $44.00 | ||
| Total | $110.75 |
As you can see, there are a set of tools for UI/UX designers, software developers, project managers, etc. Each of those tools is needed and improves the cooperation quality, communication and productivity of a development team.
If you work with a service provider like LaSoft, the agency will most probably take care of a good number of tools for the project. However, you will need to provide cloud infrastructure and related tools like CircleCI or Jenkins.
Definitely, there are many other interesting tools you may use for your project needs, such as Rocketlog and Hotjar.
Also, your cloud server infrastructure can be more complex and sophisticated, something I suggested above, but it should be considered a minimum.
Please let me know what other topics you might find interesting in modern web development.
