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Got $50k & 2 Weeks? Sprout F3 Offers Facebook App & Fan Page
Social network app development firm Sprout has announced a new program today named F3. The Sprout F3 program costs $50,000 and includes the development of a Facebook fan page, Facebook Connect application to connect back to the company’s website and a Facebook application which the company says will connect into the Facebook news feed and realtime stream.
The release indicates that some new assets will be built for the app but I fear that it will be, at least, partly cookie cutter. The sales PDF shows an asterisk next to the words ”from scratch” but there is no additional note in the document. The Sprout F3 program is a smart idea to help get new customers in the door — naturally the clients will need either more services or long-term maintenance which will be billable. Reporting is included in the overall budget.
Another company in the Facebook app development space is NY-based Buddy Media.
You’re probably right about some cookie cutter aspects, since they’re not going to rewrite the generic web service code, FB connect wrappers, and other glue/platform type stuff for every client — there wouldn’t be a technical need to. Just like we don’t rewrite other plumbing like database connection code, application frameworks, etc. for other web projects.
When we do social media apps we keep costs down making sure that any branding, design, custom features, or other client-specific pieces are written from scratch, but not generic pieces. Granted, if a client wants to pay to rewrite everything, then we’ll consider it…
$50,000 is a good-sized price tag, though — if that’s considered a teaser rate to attract new customers, we should start raising our rates.
Hi. Thanks so much for the coverage. In fact, there are no design templates at Sprout. If you’re familiar with our prosumer offering, sproutbuilder.com, you can see how we use our technology platform to make rich media development more visual and thus faster for us to develop. (A good analogy is how much easier it became to create Web pages with Dreamweaver.) Our campaigns are incredibly deep and engaging and we think $50k is a great price for a brand looking to reach fans across Facebook and have them create personalized content to share with friends.
And thanks for the alert about the missing text next to the asterisk. I will fix that! Essentially we are assuming that we will provided with brand assets and are happy to fill in some gaps but should there be no assets, we would need to charge a design fee.