Using open source products you could have a snapscan clone running within a week if the guy is doing this at night for beer money. I would say R10K bounty if you accept a web based solution.
To take it to Android you will spend R20K for more beer money. Not a full time dev, just somebody with a weekend to kill.
To take it to iOS then you are going to spend about R200K if you have a single developer. You will need to wait 2 months but no guarantee Apple will accept it on their store. So lets ignore that for now.
Now you have a very basic clone that is running off a $5 a month digital ocean instance with a mysql database. You could ask the first developer to set this up for an extra R2K else you are looking at R10K for more beer money for an ops engineer / sysadmin / etc.
But you might want some redundancy so slap in R50K for automation, another two $5 digital ocean droplets as you now want a load balancers and failover. Please note, this is still weekend beer money so give the guy 2-3 months of weekends to get this done.
You will use one of the many 3rd party credit card companies to handle wallet topups. You now need some sort of nice user web portal (bootstrap themed) so lets just say R50K for more weekend beer money.
Now you want to take this to market. You decide the marketing costs.
You start getting questions about security from potential customers. Cool, you drop another R10K on another weekend for beer money to get a free SSL certificate and since your original developer was lazy, you don't have to worry about POPI as they never logged anything in the database, only log files so you disable that.
You get your first client and you & your family buy their overpriced coffee using your clone.
Sometime later a script kiddy discovers they can log into your app using the most basic exploits and posts to MyBB. The bad press and embarrassment makes your new venture sink. Your parents move in as you blew their pension.
You are lucky that your app is not discovered by some script kiddy, just some guy in India looking for "free swag" for every exploit he discovers. You pay the "free swag" ransom fee and each patch costs you R1K to patch. Your developer overlooked the most basics of security.
You now get a big break to launch on an ecommerce store. You then have a system meltdown when you have two concurrent users attempting to transact. You then need to start hiring, so you bring on a junior for R10K a month. He seems to break more than he fixes.
You have now spent over R150K on your clone, have a monthly salary to pay of R10K along with R1K in hosting fees and other costs you do not understand. Your volumes are up to 50 transactions a month totaling R1K (R20 a cup of coffee). You make 2% so you are coining it
You now have:
* a web based clone
* an android clone with 1star ratings and 20 installs
* a web customer portal
* 3 coffee shops as clients, the other 5 have closed down the last month.
This is the reality of product development. Your product is not even compliant with local laws, it looks crap, it is crap and the developers who wrote it only did for the beer money. They never had any intention of giving you something that worked.
So don't question why people throw R2-3 million amounts at you just to give you something. And no, Standard Bank won't buy you out for R100 million. They won't even read your emails.
Sign up with Google