About a month ago I recreated the TechCrunch website in 30 minutes in one of my rapid recreation videos on YouTube.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Tom Willmott, the CEO of Human Made, the company that actually built the TechCrunch website watched my video.
Tom tweeted to let me know the actual cost of the project was $1 million dollars and very graciously he and Adrian McShane (Director of Engineering) agreed to be interviewed about how a project can cost so much.
Here’s that interview 👇
Design – $300,000
The first major line item was $300k spent on design work for the new site. This makes sense for a high-traffic site like TechCrunch that needs to balance visual appeal with performance. The design budget allowed them to craft a experience optimized for modern devices and audiences.
Infrastructure – $200,000
Next up was $200k for infrastructure costs. Considering the massive amount of traffic and content on TechCrunch, the backend servers and CDN had to be robust. This budget was used to ensure fast load times and prevent downtime at scale.
Development and Migration – $500,000
The biggest cost was $500k for the actual development and migration of the site. Human Made had a team of engineers work for around 6 months to build custom editorial workflows and migrate content from the old site. Instead of page builders, they used Gutenberg and block editing to have more control.
The development was done in an agile, iterative way with constant input from the TechCrunch team. This was important since TechCrunch’s goals evolved over the course of the project, leading to increased scope and budget.
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