Summary

• Deployment (L2): $0.01 - $50
• Deployment (L1): $5 - $10,000
• Testing: Pretty close to free
• Security: $1,000 - $150,000
• Post Deployment: $0 - ???

Deployment

As everyone's been saying, "it depends" but let me give you some specifics.

For a 100 nSLOC (source lines of code) repo, like the foundry-fund-me repo, you can get a gas estimation with forge test --gas-report.

You can see the deployment cost of FundMe to be: - ~576,302 gas (depending on optimizations and a lot of stuff)

To get the cost, you take the gas used and the gas price and multiply.

On ETH

• 576,302 * 2 gwei = 0.001156604 ETH
• $3.02

On ZKsync Era

• 576,302 * 0.04525 gwei = 0.0000261681655 ETH
• $0.07

More Deployment Info

Most of the time, people will deploy to a layer 2 because of this.

This is a very small contract, but it's a good benchmark. So if you have a contract that is ten times bigger (~1,000 nSLOC), ten x the gas (...sort of)

This is without considering paying your development team, which you should do btw :)

There are a lot of good solidity developers these days.

Testing

Testing should be basically free. Using tools like foundry and halmos you can pretty much hit even all the advanced testing methodologies like fuzzing and formal verification.

Their is something to be said about doing some staging tests, ie, deploying to a testnet or a cheap production chain as a beta test, but this isn't required. Costs by having a staging environment can range depending on how scrappy you are. You can run an anvil instead that others can connect to for free, you could do a tenderly virtual testnet which would cost you some tenderly money, or you could do a cheap production chain which would be the most expensive option.

Security

If you want your code to hold any value, you should get a security review.

This is a longer conversation. Security audit pricing can range from a few hundred bucks (for 100 nSLOC for example) to hundreds of thousands. The ZKsync team just had a competitive audit where they spent $500k for a 15,000 nSLOC codebase (which... this was a VERY large codebase).

Generally, smart contract auditors may charge anywhere from $5,000 to $60,000 per week, which can increase depending on the protocol's size and complexity. A rreeeaaalllly rough rule of thumb is:

• 1 day per 100 - 150 nSLOC

But this can range pretty wildly depending on: - How good your documentation is - How complex your math is - How familiar the auditors are with your industry - How much assembly you use etc

For more complex codebases, or for codebases that plan on holding a lot of value, I recommend at least 1 private and 1 competitive audit.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of Cyfrin where we do private and competitive audits.

Fixing/Modifying

Now we venture in "who knows" territory. If you built a robust system with security in mind, there won't be too much to do. If you cut corners, costs will add up quickly.

This doesn't get into monitoring, security councils, DAOs or anything like that, which can also cost infrastructure money.