How Much Does It Cost To Develop a React Native App?

Unlock The Factors Affecting React Native App Development Cost in 2021

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Javarevisited

13 min readJan 29, 2021

Have a look around yourself, you will find yourself surrounded by the remarkable space of technologies that are throwing ever-growing opportunities to businesses from all across the world. No matter whether it’s a small or big size of businesses, technology is ruling the sphere and predicted to turn the mobile app development industry into a 935.2 billion US dollar market in 2023.

This is why nearly every entrepreneur is clamoring to bring their brand to the mobile device. But uncertainty, when businesses landed themself in the market for a new mobile application, they might be surprised with the upfront cost of the app development that is usually starting from $38,000 to $171,000 and can climb up to any high price.

Hold on, we are not frightening you! The reality is far away from these cost estimations! Let’s dig deep and find out how?

In this blog, we will help you understand why REACT NATIVE has become a new hue in the mobile app development industry for cross-platform applications, how much it will cost you, what factors can help you decide the budget for the app development, and added advantages of choosing React Native for business application…

Sounds Interesting! Let’s get started with a basic overview!

Here’s a Key highlight of the Content:

Overview of React Native and Its Background
How Much Does It Cost To Build An App With React Native?
React Native App Development Cost Calculator
Added Advantages of Choosing React Native For Your Business App
Conclusion: Key Takeaways

1. Overview of React Native and Its Background

With the availability of various frameworks in the market, React Native has outshined as a top choice of framework for cross-platform app development in 2020. Despite being launched in March 2015, it has quickly become a choice of 42% of developers from all across the world due to its flexibility and encouraging businesses to get started with React Native solution due to its flexibility and cross-platform mobile app compatibility features.

What exactly React Native is?

React Native is an open-source mobile app development framework that has been introduced and supported by Facebook. Since it provides a wide choice of widgets and tools for developing iOS and Android operating systems, therefore, developers can save up to 40% to 90% of mobile app development time. With the code-reusability feature of this framework, it will help you save cost, time, and development resources as well.

Since React Native adopts a blend of modern yet traditional methods for app development and based on JavaScript, therefore some of the world’s leading brands have opted for this framework for their app solution. Apart from Facebook — UberEats, Airbnb, Walmart, Instagram, Tesla, and more have opted to build their app on React Native and leverage millions of Users.

2. How Much Does It Cost To Build A React Native App?

Whether you are a startup or an entrepreneur who has been running out of budget but wants to have an app on multiple operating platforms, then React Native is one of the perfect choices of cost-effective frameworks available in the market.

However, just like other app development cost estimations, it is hard to reveal the exact cost of the React Native App development. The app development cost widely depending upon the complexity of the app and the requirement of the business. Still, hourly charges for React Native App development usually started from $15 to $25+ per hour in India. However, again, the per hour cost of the developer can vary as per the skills, experience, and location.

While looking for cost-effective React Native solutions, India is comparatively offering the best and affordable services. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to compromise with the quality. Since India boasts a vast number of talented developers, therefore, providing the provision to hire app developer at competitive prices and enables you to develop an app at the lowest price in India.

Pro Tip: To keep your app development cost low, it is worth sharing or reusing your app’s components. To perform this, you can use a BIT, a perfect tool to manage your app’s components.

But, the main question remains unanswered: how much does it actually cost you?

Like any other app development, the final cost of React Native App is greatly varied as per the various factors. So let’s drill straight into the cost driving elements of the app…

3. React Native App Development Cost Calculator

When you start searching for outsourcing software development for the mobile operating system, your last decision will always end up on understanding how much your final product will cost you?

If you ask any app development company about the Android/iOS app development solutions, many of them may assure you to develop an app under $5000 to $7000. But it’s nothing more than a trap for you! The market is vast, therefore, the cost of the product will be depending upon the choice of the team you hire, the complexity of the app, choice of operating platform, design of the app, and more.

And any reputed yet professional app development company always hesitates to answer you with cost estimation immediately. Even the top software development companies will give you different numbers ranging from $10,000 to $50,000+.

So what makes the huge gap between these figures? Let’s understand the elements that bring the great variation in the financials:

App Development Process
App Functionality and Complexity
Extra App Add-Ons
UI/UX of Design
Distribution of App
App Development Team: Inhouse or Outsourcing the App Developer
Team Size and Location of the App Developer
App Maintenance and Support

Let’s get into the details of each point…

Factor 1: App Development Process

The moment you start an app development project, you will find various predefined ways to adopt it. But to be honest, that only worked in the ’90s. It isn’t something that any app development company can skip while developing an application. But the matter of the fact is, you need to adhere to the ground rules for building an application and better grasp the breakdown of the app development process to understand how each stage of app development cost you.

Discovery, Analysis, and Strategy Planning: This step is all evaluating the business app idea, competitive analysis, the goal of app development, deciding the target audience and creating the roadmap creation.

According to the clutch survey report, 51% of app development companies have revealed that the average cost of the app development discovery stage will be less than $5,000.

Wireframing and Prototyping: This phase of the app development evolves around wireframing of the app that means creating the rough representation of the app screens with clickable elements to help to understand what exactly your app will look like. The wireframing can take up to 40 to 50 hours to define user flow and journeys creation, including lo-fi sketches and detailed visual presentations.
Design and Development of the App: Now this is the major part of the application where all the UI creation and implementation will be decided. Right from the frontend, backend to testing, it includes a major part of the development. And this phase of the app development takes up to 50–70 per cent of the total cost of the app development.
Final Testing, Launching and Post Launch Maintenance: Various experts believe that post app launch support serves — the most significant component in the costs structure of mobile solutions. And to keep your app running smoothly even after its launch, it is important to hire mobile app developer to further extend the functionality and make it ready to splurge.

Factor 2: App Functionality and Complexity

When it comes to estimating how long your React Native app development project will take and what budget it requires, then keep in mind that cost and time of development are majorly depending upon the app’s complexity and functionality.

The list of the features in an app can be very lengthy or relatively short. The number of features itself is a major cost-driving factor in app development and the complexity and newness of these features can further add up the development cost. So depending upon the feature sets, mobile app development can take about a week to six months time for completion.

A simple app with MVP comes at the lower budget and is able to be completed within a shorter timeline. While the complex one with the modern features can take a long time to complete and will come at a higher budget. So ultimately, every app present in the app store has been categorized into three different categories including low complexity, medium and high complexity.

And the complexity of the app is further depending upon the six factors including:

Deployment Architecture Model: When it comes to backend development, usually app development companies have two broad choices — Custom or BaaS. In the custom option, clients get their own architecture while BaaS has to work around with readymade back-end architecture.
Third-Party Integration: To make your app user friendly, it is important to integrate third party plugins that enable your app to interact with other app’s functionality. Integration of third-party plugins in React Native App development is a bit complicated as compared to the Native App development process.
In-App Purchase: The more in-app purchase options you provide, the higher the complexity of the app is.
Admin Panel Development: The more feature-rich you choose your admin-panel to be, the more an app rises in complexity and logically affects the cost.
Integration With the Legacy System: The legacy integration of the app depends on the choice of app you are trying to build. Whether it will work independently without any integration or you want it to integrate with any of your enterprise system? The applicatical type by default falls under medium to high complexity scale.

Pro Tip: To Avoid draining the major portion of your budget and time on customizing features and functionalities of the app, it is worth hiring the mobile app development company that has experience, skills and track record of launching react native applications in a committed time period.

Factor 3: Extra App Add-Ons

Though React Native is a type of framework that allows you to develop highly appealing applications, but still if you are trying to build a customer-centric application, then you can choose to integrate your app with Social media channels or provide add-ons for it. However, the custom add-ons to your app can further add up the cost to the budget, so ultimately the integration of the Add-ons completely depends upon the choice and need of the client.

Factor 4: UX/UI Design of the App

How your app will look and work for the users can make a great difference in its success and cost. And mobile app design encompasses both the user interface(UI) and User Experience(UX) and this is what actually keeps your users engaged longer with the app. Also, an app that ensures smooth transitions from one screen to another, will ensure efficient user flow and excellent user experience. The designing of screens and user experience could be easily associated with the app development cost.

Pro Tip: React Native provides you various UI component libraries including NativeBase, React Native Element, Lottie Wrapper, Vector icons, React Native Maps, React Native Gifted Chat and more. Various UI component elements allow you to design beautiful user-friendly apps without even writing the codes from scratch.

Factor 5: Distribution of the App

There are a number of distribution channels that deploy your app and each channel has its own set of pricing. However, with 3.1 and 3.7 billion applications in Google Play Store and Apple App Store, both platforms have undoubtedly become leading titans for businesses these days. The commercial stores like App store and Google Play may charge you around $100 as a license fee. Also the app developer has to acquire the grant from the host to make sure that all the development standards and policies adhered.

Building an app natively for each platform using Swift, Java, Android or iOS, will typically take a huge time for developing multiple codebase. However, with React Native, you can easily save up 25 to 50% time as you only need to create a single codebase.

Pro Tip: The cross-platform app development frameworks like React Native can trim down the app development cost and time up to 50% and allow you to launch an app 1.5x faster than native apps.

Factor 6: App Development Team: Inhouse or Outsource the App Developer

When it comes to hiring an app developer, broadly you have two choices: either develop an in-house team of engineers or outsource the app development team. The cost of outsourcing development team is usually an affordable option than developing an in-house team as you don’ need to gain any knowledge upon what type of engineers you would require for the project. Further, cut down the need to spend time on screening each profile, providing training, bearing electricity bills, monthly salaries and more.

However, with the outsourcing React Native App Development team you have the provision to choose from three engaging models including Hourly basis, part-time or full-time basis depending upon the project needs and complexity.

Pro Tip: Since React Native has already become a top choice of app development and based on JavaScript, therefore, businesses can have enough options to make a choice for their app development.

Factor 7: Team Size and Location of App Development Team

When it comes to developing an application, you need a team of engineers consisting of a project manager, backend developer, frontend developer, app tester, and UX/UI designer. But the per hour cost of each developer varies greatly according to the location and depending upon the living cost of the location.

Nevertheless, according to the survey report, India is a hot spot for hiring app developers with an average hourly cost of $15 to $25+.

Factor 8: App Maintenance and Support

The mobile app development cost doesn’t end even with the final deployment of the app. To make it run smoothly and hassle-free, many app development companies provide you app maintenance and support services. Regular updates and bug fixing is very important, therefore, customers have to understand this factor while estimating the cost. To push out some updates in your existing app, you can choose to hire mobile app developers on an hourly basis.

Pro Tip: And when it comes to maintaining and carrying out updates in the React Native application, you need to hire fewer resources, as you only need to maintain a single codebase.

4. How It Can Help You Save a Cost On Mobile App Development?

While React Native was set in motion in 2015, businesses have to set an expensive budget to develop two native apps for Android and iOS.

With the aim to minimize the development cost, Facebook has intentionally implemented a new tool that basically focuses on reducing the development cost of the project.

Facebook has created React Native integrated with JS library that works as a core for building the user interface of the app. So whether you are a web developer or a React Native App developer, both can seamlessly leverage this broad library and are able to customize the look and feel of the app that delivers a Native type user experience.

Second, the most exciting part about using React Native is that any mobile app development company can directly use it to develop a fast, efficient and straightforward app for multiple operating systems by leveraging a single JavaScript codebase.

Apart, being JavaScript Framework, it allows mobile app developers to write real and Native embedded applications for both iOS and Android. Here are the few added features of React Native that make it suitable for almost any type of project:

JavaScript As Programming Language: With React Native, app developers have to use JavaScript which is already one of the widely-used and fastest-growing programming languages among developers. Also, 90% of developers are already aware of this language, so they can skip to the learning curve.

Easy To Implement Updates: Developers can upgrade the React Native app without even downloading the app and save a huge amount of time.

Cross-Platform and Code Reusability: React Native app solution can cost you half price of developing two native apps. All you need to do is to hire a software development company that has all the skills to reap the best benefit of this feature and able to develop multiple applications by reusing the same codebase.

Hot Reload: It allows developers to save a huge amount of time in project development as they can make instant changes in the coding and reflect it immediately without having to download the file.

Conclusion: Key Takeaways

If you are an entrepreneur who wants to get started with a mobile application but running short of budget, then React Native can be a perfect choice for you. Right from faster development to hassle free app maintenance, easy migration of mobile apps from any platform to strong community support, React Native mobile app development company can ensure you everything that can help you reduce the app development cost and time.

With all such features and advantages, React Native seems to be a godsend framework for businesses seeking for cost-effective ways to build a cross-platform app to a large segment of the market. This blog has explained all the cost deciding factors for react native app development, still if you have any doubt or query regarding how much does it cost to develop a React Native application, then drop a query to engineers.