Hi Guys, 
Let me introduce myself I am Ameen 28 years old based out of Dubai,UAE.

 In 2016 I came to know about bitcoin and bought lots of them at 300 USD and Ether at 1-2 $, Which made me a fortune and turned my life from downside to upside, To be frank, I bought my first home and beautiful car from this and I am very thankful for cryptocurrency and the community who are backing it. 

So I am one among those lucky guys whose life changed by cryptocurrency.

That's a bit about me and I am new to Steemit, and this is my first post.

Back to the main story: 

Recently after the craze of ICO, I was planning to launch my ICO for crypto fund management and gaming industry. I came across many so called BLOCKCHAIN developers and ICO smart contract developers who just update their Linkedin and upwork freelance sites as blockchain professionals & consultants, who are charging a bomb like ($40000  to $100000 ) for 50 lines or 100 lines code which are freely available solidity code on etherscan.io and their advice.

The main reason I want to share my experience is, don't be scammed by this price. They don't cost such a price for writing a whitepaper or writing a solidity code if you want to start your ICO.

When you approach any developer for making your first solidity smart contract, first they will ask for your budget and they will start quoting you some crazy price.

What most of them do is they just copy similar contract from etherscan.io and deploy for you.

There are very few qualified solidity ethereum smart contract developers who can make advanced contacts like using orcale to take data from off-chain, send profit distribution smart contract and more

After many bad experiences I have built my rules: 

1.Make sure you interview your developer, ask lots of questions on ICO and their experience.

2.make sure that they are updated on daily news on ICO and they are aware of what is happening in the market. Each day new update is made to ethereum network.

Example : 
Now ERC23 tokens are being tested when most of the big ICO are using ERC20 tokens. Most of the developers are not even aware of this ERC23.

3.Ask for the duration and how long will it take to deliver the project and ask for their previously done smart contracts.

Most importantly there are few services like minereum where you can get an  ERC20 basic contract for 1 MNE which is costing around 6 USD now. where you buy 1 MNE from the exchange and send to their address, they will create you basic ERC20 contract in few minutes. I think it is enough for most of ICO's

If you need more functions to be added to your contract, you can find some developers on freelancer website like upwork.com and compare their pricing between each other.

They should cost you from $20 per hour to 60$ per hour, they charge 40 hours per week, some contacts takes time like 2 or 3 weeks approx $3000 - $6000 for very good qualified developer and who will do bug fixing too and verify your contract on etherscan.io blockchain explorer. 

Never pay the cost in full, pay them in 3 parts as stage 1: advance/ Stage 2: after completion and delivery of smart contract/ Stage 3: then verified code with all bugs fixed.

https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/zeppelin-solidity/tree/master/contracts/token 
here is the link of some of the standard solidity token codes for free from author  Zeppelin

I hope this article is helpful for some newbies like me trying to launch an ICO with ethereum smart contract and had no idea where to start. 

Feel free to share your experience with developing smart contract using solidity one below comments. 

Thanks