Yeah, except he himself described the first app as "simple" and the next 9 apps after the first consisted of nothing more than changing the YouTube channel id the app pointed to and changing the app's name.

$50,000 seems pretty exorbitant for a "simple" app that does nothing more than embed YouTube videos.

$50,000 for the literally 5 minutes of work involved in changing the channel ID and app name is downright comical.

There's no way to spin this as $500,000 worth of work. I don't care what his billing rates are. (And I suspect his billing rates aren't very high to begin with — he doesn't strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed.)

Actually that sort of semi-custom simple rebranding is an exceedingly common business model for boutique software shops. You find a market where the framework for your application works with minimal changes across a large variety of clients. The sales cycle then becomes the scaling bottle neck. It is sort of the other side of the coin of low touch SaaS.

You are making a common mistake on pricing something based on the amount of work it requires, not on the amount of value it provides. I can't imagine that a rebranded youtube viewer provides 50K worth of value to anyone, but it wouldn't be nearly the most outlandish work/value ratio I've seen.

50K of "billing" time for a prototype that views one youtube channel seems excessive. At $150/hr that's over 2 months of fulltime development for something a real developer could knock out in a couple days.

I don't think he could have found clients gullible enough to pay that much for what's essentially a web view in a minimal wrapper. But I suck at the marketing.