Development of methods for assessing the value of IT services at early stages

IT services have become an important part of the digital economy, and high-quality performance of work on their cost estimation can contribute to the efficiency of the industry’s development. The purpose of this work was the formation of proposals for the development of methods for estimating the cost of IT projects at an early stage in order to obtain more well-argued and accurate results. To achieve the goal, the main methods of evaluating projects at an early stage were analyzed and their characteristic problems were identified, which primarily consist in the subjectivity of the received evaluations. It turned out that if the service has at least remote operating analogues, there is an opportunity to forecast the amount of profit due to the assumed dynamics of changes in the number of users, taking into account the average income per client and the corresponding marketing costs, thus calculating the estimated value. The resulting improved method can be characterized as a combination of the comparative and income approach. In conclusion, it is emphasized that the appraiser has a choice - to use traditional methods that allow to obtain faster results and work in conditions of lack of information on transactions with similar objects, or to use an improved method that provides higher transparency of results and connection with market data.