It *totally* depends on what it is. Again, it comes down to the actual requirements list. It could be way too much, or way too little. If it's a ghetto VB6 front end to a open source command line encoder, without support, without bugfixes, without documentation, without a fancy interface, without (...) and writen by a out-of-school n00b that also happens to be in a country with dirt cheap labor... Then it's WAY too much. If they have to write their own codecs in assembly for just about every possible format from scratch, pay the licensing fees for every technology used, have to deliver full documentation, free bugfixes within 24h for the next decade included, including the subcontracting for usability studies and graphics artists, professionally localized in different languages (including the help and installer), and the code written by a team of guys with a PhD's from a top-ranking uni in the USA and all that, then you're at the very least missing 2 or 3 zeros. Then for the website (including payment processing, the back end for the updates, bug tracking, keeping track of issued licenses, etc) you can very easily blow another 10K. And another 10K would disappear VERY quickly with adwords or such e.g. just for "audio converter" you're looking at $0.42/click (fraudulent or not), and out of the estimated 1M searches for those exact terms alone, even if only 1% click it that's $4200/month (still only for a single keyword combo)... And that's assuming everything goes perfectly, but if you were more familiar with the software development world, you'd know that projects are hardly ever on time and on budget (and with every feature you wanted) -- it happens like 20% of the time perhaps. And most likely, there was a difference between whatever you wanted and what you asked for (99% likely) and you will have to revise your requirements (which will increase price, or they can spend the time on that instead of some other feature you wanted). Scenarios were people spent two or three times as much as originally planned before canning the whole project aren't exactly unheard of (sometimes costing hundreds of millions!) I've seen it first hand more than once. Project management is hard. Also, the next update/version won't be free either. This is only the very beginning. And even if everything goes right development-wise which is quite unlikely, it doesn't exactly mean it'll be a commercial success either. How did you know that one click cost 0.42 for audio converter? And how much buyers I ll get if 1000 people will visit my website?