Predicting budget for Crowdsourced and Freelance Software development Projects

In this paper we propose an approach to estimate the right budget for a crowdsourced or freelance project job. Estimating right budget for a job is an important and challenging exercise. The budget depends on marketplace dynamics; such as job complexity, skills required, duration, etc. As manually understanding the dynamics of marketplace is time consuming and error prone, we propose a data driven approach to estimate the right budget. We study various factors that contribute to final remuneration made upon job completion and use the above studies to recommend an approach. The approach is validated on the data collected from Upwork's database, which contains data from the job activity happening on the largest freelancing website. Our results indicate that budget for a job can be relatively well predicted as compared to baseline approach.