Smart contract development cost by type of project
What smart contract development costs by project type, what adds effort, how the vendor's region changes the price, and which hidden costs to budget.
6 min read
Free tool
Smart contract development cost calculator
An indicative budget and duration to build your contracts and their tests, priced with the typical day rates of the vendor's region. The model is published below.
How the estimate is calculated
The calculator applies a simple, published model. Change a parameter above and the estimate follows these values.
Effort by type (developer-days)
- Token
- 5 to 12 days
- NFT collection
- 8 to 18 days
- Staking or vesting
- 12 to 25 days
- DAO or governance
- 15 to 35 days
- Real-world asset tokenization
- 25 to 55 days
- DEX or AMM
- 40 to 90 days
- Lending protocol
- 60 to 130 days
- Bridge
- 70 to 150 days
Components (developer-days)
- Upgradeability
- 3 to 6 days
- Oracle integration
- 3 to 8 days
- Web front end (dApp)
- 15 to 40 days
- Back end or indexer
- 10 to 25 days
- Each additional chain
- 3 to 6 days
Senior day rate (USD)
- North America
- $900 to $1,500
- Western Europe
- $700 to $1,200
- Eastern Europe
- $450 to $800
- Latin America
- $400 to $700
- Asia
- $350 to $700
Chain
- EVM (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum…)
- × 1
- Solana
- × 1.25
- Move (Aptos, Sui)
- × 1.2
- Other
- × 1.3
- Project management and QA
- +15%
Formula
Developer-days = (effort of the type + components + additional chains) × chain × (1 + project management and QA). Price = developer-days × day rate of the region, low and high. The duration assumes two developers working five days a week.
What the estimate does not cover
- The audit and re-audit, to budget separately with an independent auditor.
- Maintenance, monitoring and deployment gas after launch.
- A quote: only vendors can commit to a price, after reading your brief.
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