There has been some Twitter noise about the “cost" of the NHSX COVID Tracker being £11.8M.

I say “cost" because it's not clear how it breaks down.

What the noise made clear was that there is very little awareness of how much nation scale digital services cost to build.

/1

Is £11.8M a big number? A small number? I mean, Liverpool paid £35M for Andy Carroll or roughly £6M per goal.

How much does it cost to build something that will be used by an entire country?

So here are a couple of example from things I built.

/2

Everyone in the UK will have used the Electoral Registration System. We built that for just under £1M. It uses Responsive Design so it works on phones, tablets and PCs and it integrates with DWP and every local authority.

/3

The new Apprenticeships Service cost around £12M. It is essentially an integrated banking engine, online contracting service, online recruitment and HR system, job finder and payments service.

It integrates with HMRC and provides connections for businesses.

/4

Those are the development and delivery costs for two nation scale digital services. They do not include the costs of policy teams or any new organisations to run them.

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