Last week, one of our business development executives came to me with an odd problem. She was approached by two US-based prospective clients seeking to develop an Uber-like taxi application as they had come to know about our successfully deployed previous applications and considered Charpixel Technologies as an expert.

Both of these clients wanted us to add all the modern-day features (the client’s so-called requirement) that a Taxi app might have (what we think) such as Geo-location, Geo-tagging, push notifications, Fingerprint security, Car-pooling, peak hour pricing, price calculator, discount vouchers etc. The apps were to be delivered using the latest tech stack ( Angular 2, Java, Swift3.0, NodeJS ) in a short period (not an issue for Charpixel Technologies).

So on the very first meeting with our executive, they asked her the million dollar question- How much time and money will this take? The answer to their question- It depends! what are the exact features that one may want, does one need an admin panel? does one need separate apps for driver and rider? There are so many questions to be asked before one can give a final quotation, so our executive declined an exact cost and time estimate (she gave a rough idea) even though the client was not happy with her answer. The moment the meeting was over she came to my desk and asked me why I did not give exact estimates – After all we have done this before, we know what it takes! her curious questions needed me to explain to her the company policy and the logic behind it.

Yes! we know very well what this kind of app requires feature-wise and technology-wise because we have done it before however, we do not know what the client exactly requires and hence cannot comment on an exact time and cost estimate. The client might have a different idea and we might quote him for a different one. Based on this we came up with the policy of first hearing the idea and then asking for a full-fledged statement of work document to ensure that we are always on the same page as the client before giving a final quote.

Once we have all the requirements with us, all it takes is to sit with the technical team and calculate the man-hours involved which will always ensure that our client gets what he wanted from the very beginning at the Time & Cost he was promised. This is one of the strong steps that we take at Charpixel Technologies to improve our quality rather than luring clients with false promises!