How much does it cost to make a social network website exactly like Facebook with the same features?

“If you asked me to buildhttp://facebook.com/ for you, I would quote you $500,000 and nine months of development and design time,” says Schippers. “Others would say one million or a much bigger number. But it’s a very challenging question to answer because what it would cost to build is a small number while operational costs are enormous.” With the existing product in mind, the $500,000 would be broken out evenly over the nine months with the first three months dedicated to design, specifically user architecture, brand and polish design. The remaining six months would be focused on bringing the design to life, while the remaining would be focused on deployment and refinement. Taking into account the difference in storage costs in 2002, Schippers estimates that Zuckerberg was spending $3,000 per month on hosting for the first year and about $10 million per month by 2006 as the network grew exponentially in that time period. Considering Facebook’s scale, the company is now in the business of operating power plants to operate its servers, therefore, Schippers estimates that Facebook has a $30 million dollar monthly burn rate just for hosting. Suddenly, those multi-million dollar financing rounds that startups raise don’t seem so outrageous! http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds-hottest-startups/

It depends on what you mean by "basic". "The first 100 million users are the hardest…"

Instead of building a clone from scratch, buy one of the many clone scripts available that replicate the features of Facebook. Otherwise, you could be looking upwards of 200k+ for a proper clone script.

To be honest there a lot of already made script so my short answer is $43 only http://codecanyon.net/item/phpdolphin-social-network-platform/5158794?ref=micro_design

I have some experience developing a social community based platform which had certain features that were aligned with a regular social media site and a few of its own unique features and to date my team has spent about 650-700 hours roughly on the platform however this much hours were spent because I had an intern doing some work on the project which tool longer than usual. My development fee however was around 450 - 500( South African rands)

Very little. Maybe $1-5k. But you ca n easily create a crappie version of Facebook. Look for available scripts, or go on Youtube, there's a tutorial on creating a social network website.

If you have a bit of talent and know how, you can set up a similar experience for just the cost of a domain name and server costs. The real challenge is finding the right framework and technology to use that is easy enough for you to build in based on your experience level but can also scale to meet the demands of your users as you grow.

there are open source social media packages, so all it would cost is a little time to configure and customize. But, honestly, unless you are bringing something new to the table, you will be wasting your time: "Hey! I just built a new site, its like facebook, only without the features, do you want to come use it?" "Err, no thanks." Ello is a good example of how such ideas fail. Ello isn't dead yet, but its huge growth was very short lived, and regular users are dwindling.

I'm curious what your purpose would be in creating such a site since FaceBook already exists. Unless you take on this project yourself, it can get very expensive. You have to manage server side data and prevent data breaches and design the client side interface as well. If you want to take on the challenge of learning some new programming, this would be a good opportunity.