What are your guesstimates...

[Starting Big]

I want a 'Ding', much like the one Southwest Airlines allows people to download into their system tray, then whenever a predefined parameter becomes available, the people who have the 'Ding' will be notified with bells & whistles sounding off. I don't want to post on a freelance site because I don't know if I'd be able to afford the functionality and also because I'm not ready for it. Anyone here have any guesses as to a price range once could expect to pay for this type of functionality?

Thanks,
James

[Chris]

So you want a windows program that runs in the systray that gets data from an external source at regular intervals, when a condition is met it dings?

You wouldn't be able to instantly push data to it, I don't think anyways, that'd be a security issue, it may cause people to limit adoption. Plus, what happens if the person is offline at the time? I think the better way is to have it query a web service every x minutes.