How I stopped guessing software prices and built a math model instead

说明与用途

作者创建了 Project Estimator，本地工具将学术成本模型合并为单一公式，提供准确的工时和价格估算，消除低估和高估。

问题

Freelance developers and small agencies often lose money due to inaccurate project estimates, leading to overwork or underpayment.

结果

Accurate estimates matched actual billable hours, eliminating overwork and underpayment, and enabling consistent fixed-price proposals.

工作流

• Define work items and group them into a tree structure.
• Assign base hours for each leaf work item.
• Adjust for deliverable quality, complexity, skill gap, and kept factors using the provided multipliers.
• Add integration hours and optional risk hours based on residual probability and mitigation.
• Calculate nominal hours, total hours, and apply strategy multiplier, discount, and margin to derive final price.
• Export estimate as PDF or JSON, or copy LLM prompt for automation.
• Use the local tool to keep data private and repeatable.

证据

After numerous works with different clients that ended up draining a lot of energy because of low estimates, I studied a series of different cost models to better price my works.

来源

The tool is totally free, with no sign-up and no back-end: your data is never recorded anywhere.

来源