How long does it take to develop a typical plug-in?

Question

I'm thinking of hiring a developer to build some plug-ins. Since I'm not a programmer, I don't have a good sense of how many hours of programming work might be involved. I know plug-ins vary in complexity and there's no exact answer of course, but if some of the people who have developed plugs such as Noah and Scott could give me a rough idea of how many hours it took them to program various plug-ins they developed, and how they rate the complexity of those plug-ins, it could be very helpful reference information for me and presumably for other site developers/owners as well.

 

Thank you.

Comments

I don't do much Freelance Developing, but here is what I know:
"The Time" needed to develop totally depend on the programmer. If you are not familiar with the performance of a programmer/designer it may be unwise to pay him hourly except if you believe in your lock.
to know how much it will cost to develop a plugin you must first estimate how much time a normal developer will spend one the project and pay your developer the same price. he may be an expert and do the job in few hours or weeks. now how much is the price for hiring a normal developer cost, I have no idea. I worked from 10$ to 300$ per hour :D

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Thanks but I'm really not asking about those things, I'm simply asking as a reference how long it took the major plug-in developers here to developer their plug-ins.

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This is a really bad question :)
analysis: depends on your needs
creating standard plugin files: 5 min
setting up options: 3 to 30 min
algorithms if needed: depends on what you need, maybe hours or days
functions adding output to layout or performing needed tasks: up to 30 min
testing and fixing bugs: maybe hours, minimum 10 min
I spent 2 hours for creating "Recent Tweets" plugin for Q2A which was my first Q2A add-on.

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towhid i think that you do not understand what's  asking DanR.
he is only asking to who has yet created plug in on this platform what are the times that they have invested to create them.
Surely he know all that you have written that is normal when someone develop everything

Answer 1

As far as I remember I needed 2 days for most-active-users plugin, and about 1 week (not full time) + 3 weeks testing to create the best-users-per-months plugin.

PS: I was new to q2a.