On March 16, 2019, Tan Kin Lian shared a post detailing what a lady had supposedly told him during his time at Hong Lim park.

"At Hong Lim Park, a woman told me that the parking app developed by the team headed by PM Lee's son costed $30 million. I was astounded. It cannot cost that much.

I searched the internet but could not find any mention of the cost.

My estimate of the cost is $30,000 to $300,000, depending on the vendor selected to do the job.

Does anyone know?"

While Tan rightfully doubted the legitimacy of the S$30 million claim, he, as well as most people, were unsure of the actual figures behind the app.

Clarification

Luckily for him, and anyone who was still confused, Parking.sg came up with a breakdown of what their app costs to maintain.

Here is the post.

"Some of you may be interested to hear how much it cost to develop and maintain parking.sg.

The project received a 4-year funding of $1.96 million in Feb 2017. By using modern cloud services, we are able to keep the cost low. For those of you who are interested, here are some services used in our production system and the rough monthly costs:

~$5000 a month for cloud hosting and databases

~300 a month for a Content Delivery Network which also provides DNS and DDOS protection

~$200 a month for a service that automatically tests and deploys our code

~$100 a month for service monitoring and alerts

~$30 a month for Customer Relationship Management system to respond to your feedback

~$40 a month for database backups

~$25 a month for the informational site you see at parking.sg

Instead of hiring an external vendor, Parking.sg was built in-house by the project team themselves.

Various people on the project team helped out, but at any point there were at most 3 people working full time on it. This saved us a lot of money since we didn’t have extra project management overhead or procurement costs.

We are grateful for this opportunity to share more on the costing of the project and will share more when we open-source the project in the first half of this year. If you have any suggestions on how we can be more efficient, we would love to hear from you."

One of the reasons they gave for them saving money was due to the app being built in-house by the team themselves, which led to less procurement costs as well as reducing project management overhead.

It was previously reported in Feb. 2019 that the app was used 1.1 million times a month and sale of parking coupon booklets have gone down by more than two-thirds.

Image from Gov Tech