How Should Software Development Costs Be Calculated in 2024?

How should person-day cost be calculated in the software industry?

For software companies that license a product they have built—like Softomi—quoting custom development on a simple person-day basis is extremely hard. Below are a few analogies that show why.

For example:

You own a football club and you sign a star striker. The player can play the next match a few days later and score.

You own a private hospital and you hire a famous neurosurgeon. On day one they can operate on a patient who has already completed the required tests.

You run a law firm and you hire a senior lawyer. The same day you can hand them a new case file.

You run a garment workshop and you hire a new master tailor. They can start sewing on day one.

You own a private school and you hire a computer teacher. They can start teaching the curriculum on day one.

You run a software company and you hire a senior developer with 10 years of experience! (This is where uncertainty starts.)

To work on a complex product like Softomi’s marketplace software, they may need months of training just to understand the codebase and business rules: how order amounts are split to sellers by commission rules, how campaigns are applied, how data flows into reports, integration with Paraşüt (accounting), reversals for cancellations/refunds, prorated shipping charges, and dozens of linked features—before they can ship meaningful changes.

So the team spends months onboarding the new hire; trainers are paid while they teach; the new hire is paid too; only after perhaps 6–8 months do they become productive—or they may leave, and the investment is lost.

For these reasons, a clean person/day number is very hard to pin down. The section below walks through a step-by-step cost model. A software house that ignores true payroll and operating cost will eventually leave the market—and its customers’ projects stall. Nobody wins, so the topic deserves serious attention.

The walkthrough is long, but splitting daily people cost from the overhead needed to keep the company alive is critical; it is worth the read.

How should person-day cost be calculated?

For 2024, Turkey has 248 working days in the year.

That is about 20.66 days per month on average.

An employee with one year of tenure typically uses 14 working days of leave, plus sick leave and other absences—assume about 20 non-working days in total per year.

20 days ÷ 12 ≈ 1.66 leave days per month.

20.66 − 1.66 = 19 — net working days per month per person in 2024 (in this model).

A developer with about 5–8 years of experience might earn roughly TRY 65,000 net per month in the market. For the employer, annual loaded cost can be on the order of TRY 1,405,215 (see payroll breakdown). Monthly loaded cost ≈ TRY 117,101. Across ~19 working days, that is about TRY 6,163 per day.

For a 3–4 year profile the daily figure might be ~TRY 1,500 lower; for a more senior profile, roughly TRY 1,000 higher.

Training and other people-related cost

Marketplace software is difficult; at our company new hires receive at least three months of training before they touch non-trivial projects.

Training cost ≈ TRY 117,101 × 3 = TRY 351,303.

If someone works two years and then has to leave, that training amortizes to about TRY 351,303 ÷ 24 ÷ 19 ≈ TRY 770 per working day.

TRY 6,163 + 770 = TRY 6,933 per day for one person in this model.

That is still only the person. You then allocate operating overhead per head to reach break-even: what each employee must “earn back” monthly just to keep the lights on. At Softomi, overhead lands around TRY 350 per person per day. Example: TRY 350 × 19 × 15 people ≈ TRY 99,750 / month (rent, servers, general admin).

Daily break-even for delivery work ≈ TRY 6,933 + 350 = TRY 7,283.

The hidden cost of the bad scenario

Every software firm makes the onboarding investment described above. Yet there is no guarantee the developer stays. A few months after training they may quit, move abroad (as many developers do), or work remotely for an overseas company at a much higher USD salary.

Losing hires after a short time is something small shops see dozens of times and large ones hundreds of times.

Hard to measure precisely, but for a company of Softomi’s scale, unpaid “lost” investment tied to churn can be on the order of TRY 5 million.

Corporate vendors must keep engineering teams ready for customers even in slow months—paying salaries while losing money month to month.

Economic swings, recession, election stress, earthquakes: they are part of reality in Turkey; firms sometimes burn savings to survive.

That hidden downside is funded by product revenue and package sales—not baked into the quoted person-day rate for small change requests.

Organizations that want to use software usually face two paths

1. Build in-house with your own team

At today’s cost levels, if ten developers deliver one marketplace product in twelve months, start-up cost is on the order of TRY 12 million. The cost of bugs and unhappy buyers/sellers at go-live is impossible to fully quantify. Expect ~six months post-launch to fix issues and close gaps—another ~TRY 6 million in people cost. General admin at TRY 100k/month for 18 months ≈ TRY 1.8m. Total ballpark ≈ TRY 19.8 million for 18 months. After delivery, running with five people might cost ~TRY 500k/month (severance for laid-off staff not included here).

2. Buy from a software vendor

Instead of funding that and waiting ~1.5 years, an investor can launch a marketplace project in about a month by licensing—for example—our Entegre package at TRY 275,000 + VAT (figures as in the original article).

For a feature not included in the packages, we bill about 50% above our break-even person-day of TRY 7,283—i.e. TRY 10,924 + VAT—so you get the capability you want on the product.

What does that amount cover?

1) The developer who builds the change,

2) A second developer learning the same area (in software, one or two backups matter) so support continues if the primary is away or leaves,

3) Our consultants scoping the request, hand-off to R&D, solution design, communication with the customer, contracts, and workflow.

The fee is typically one-time; ongoing responsibility stays with Softomi. (If both primary and backup leave, a third engineer takes over the feature.)