throwaway342110

I have been doing some freelance development on smaller projects. The usual range being 100 - 300 hours. I also work on my own product, so I know what's it's like to develop a product that spans 3,000 hours in scope, but I have never done it professionally, for someone else.

Now a good client of mine is asking to develop an SaaS app. It's a typical CRUD app, nothing extremely complex, nothing that could not be done in a stock Next.js setting. Yet when I think about the scope of it, I think it would probably take some 1,000 hours to get a crude prototype, another 1,000 hours to add some features and polish it and then 500 hours to get it ready to be Internet facing, with payment system and so on. And that does not even include communication with the client, changes, buffer. I don't think I am out of my mind, if I think I would need to bill some 3,000 hours at the very least for the base product and any extra features being an extra premium (I did not really dig into the scope in detail yet, I am just guessing).

So let's say it takes 3,000h. If I work 30h/week just on that product (there are also other admin tasks and what not), it will take me 100 weeks or 2 years to deliver it. Is it something expected in the industry? Or am I simply uncompetitive for a project like this?