How much does it cost to build a mobile app? (UPDATED)
How much does it cost to build a mobile app? Asking this question is a lot like looking at the price of a car: it depends on what you want to accomplish.
First, you need to specify what car you want.
What brands do you trust? How many seats do you need, and how much room in the trunk? Should the gearbox be manual or automatic? What about fuel type? Gasoline, electricity or a hybrid?
There are dozens if not hundreds of other questions you need to answer to prepare for buying a car that you’ll be happy with. And your answers will have a direct impact on the car’s price. App development cost estimation is exactly like that.
Building custom software is a complex service.
It’s impossible to put a price tag on your vision for a product without knowing exactly what it is. That’s why it’s so difficult to get an estimated price early on, without clarifying the app’s specifications. Even if you get one, it’ll be only as accurate as the information it’s based on.
We can’t tell you how much it’ll cost to develop your app, not without having a conversation first, but we can provide you with a soft mobile app cost estimation template. These are the factors that make up the final cost of your app — you can use them to judge what the budget for your mobile project should be.
The factors influencing mobile app development cost
Have you ever asked about the cost of developing a mobile app and received the answer “it depends”? It’s not an uncommon thing to hear because of how many factors influence the cost of app development. The most important among them can be divided into two groups.
1. Internal factors
These are the results of the situation your business is in and your team’s knowledge base. Examples include your experience within your industry and your budget.
Project scope
Whether you want to build an MVP, a simple app, or a very complex product. Maybe you need only the backend or frontend for your app, or a new feature added to an existing product. Generally, the smaller the scope, the lower the price.
In-house know-how
How much you and your internal team can offer in terms of knowledge about your market, user base, business model, tech expertise, and software project management. The more experienced specialists you hire the more they cost, but ultimately they can do a better job in less time, meaning a lower spend overall.
Provided materials
What you have prepared or intend to prepare for the app, including full specifications, in-app copy, and designs. You can use existing resources to lower development costs by doing part of the work in-house.
Budgeting
What your budget allows and how you allocate it between your app’s lifecycle phases ( planning and development, maintenance, scaling, and promotion).
Deadlines
How fast development will have to be. This influences team size and therefore the monthly or weekly development cost (even though the total cost might be roughly equal to what you would spend if working with a smaller team over a longer period of time). Additionally, ‘express’ services may cost extra.
2. External factors
These factors are tied to which development partner you choose, what tech talent is available to you, and which technologies you intend to use.
Market price
The pricing of app development services, which varies by country and changes over time.
Contractor’s size
If you want to work with a big development company with an established market position, their pricing might make you hesitate. But the costs account for the tremendous added value of a stable partner — one who won’t have problems with delivering your dream product.
Work with established companies tends to go faster, involve little to no risk, and give you more flexibility in terms of available talent.
Contractor’s location
Location affects pricing because operational costs depend on it. You might be thinking about working with a local team so you can make face-to-face communication, but it’s not always worth the additional cost of app development. The modern workplace is highly remote, so there are processes and tools to work effectively across different locations and even time zones.
Contractor’s know-how
This is the main value the contractor brings into the project, and it affects cost in two opposite ways. On the one hand, know-how means efficient process and well chosen solutions, which lead to a lower overall cost of development.
On the other hand, an experienced contractor will have higher rates per hour than one still working on their reputation. Development with some frameworks and programming languages costs more than with others, and so do the services of Senior Developers. However, a good team with the right technology can make development go faster, greatly reduce the risk that large issues will occur, and problem-solve effectively in case of trouble. As a result, you won’t have to pay for fixing developer mistakes.
Emerging technologies
If you want to use very specific technologies in your project, particularly ones that few developers specialise in, the costs of this service might be high.
Talent availability
As above, if the talent you need is rare (in your area or in general), their services will be expensive.
Mobile development project estimation questionnaire
Once you’ve understood the factors that go into building a project estimate, you might want to quickly collect the information for your development partner.
This questionnaire is a simple way to get it done.
- What is your app’s main goal?
- Who is your target audience?
- What functions does your app need?
- On what platform will the app be available (initially)?
- On what devices will your users interact with your app?
- What third-party integrations do you need?
- What scope of work do you want your development partner to be responsible for?
- Which parts of the work will you be responsible for?
- What’s your deadline for this project?
These nine questions should get you started no matter what app you want to build, but they might not be enough if you’re planning to disrupt your market through cutting-edge tech or an unprecedented business model.
If you’re an innovator, you’ll need to provide details on how our app is going to be unique, and work with your development partner to make the best technological choices for your business.
Mobile development platform choice
Choosing between mobile platforms is actually a fairly complex process.
You have more options than just the two popular platforms (iOS and Android), as you can build a native app for each (or only one) platform, or use mostly the same code for both with a cross-platform app. These choices are very important when you want to estimate app development costs.
Developing two different native apps involves more work and usually two separate teams, and is therefore more expensive, but it comes with a number of benefits for both your users and your business. Cross-platform apps, on the other hand, don’t offer the same level of optimisation for users’ devices, preferences, and habits. They are, however, faster to develop and can reach a wide audience at the same time.
You’ll find out that iOS and Android users differ from each other when it comes to their preferences, spending habits, and geographical distribution. You’re going to need a strong idea of who our users are and what devices they use before you choose the right platform for your mobile app.
Once you’ve done so, the next step is to choose your tech stack.
There are no universal rules dictating which technologies should be used for what purpose. It’s something that should be assessed on a case-by-case basis by an expert or an experienced team. In our experience, face-to-face consultations work best, as they allow the expert to truly understand your expectations and needs.
Netguru’s mobile app development cost calculator — average pricing
Our team of mobile development and product design experts have been helping companies across many industries, with very different needs, goals, and limitations. We work with startups, medium sized businesses, and enterprises across the world.
The apps we build can be small, fully coded in 1–2 months, medium sized, or very large and complex. That’s why it’s impossible to create precise pricing plans for our clients. We can, however, provide you with approximate price ranges, calculated based on your project’s level of complexity and the time needed to develop it.
The dangers of mobile app development cost calculation
There are several factors that commonly threaten the accuracy of development cost estimations. Luckily, knowing about then ahead of time is usually enough to avoid these issues.
Superficial input from the client leads to inaccurate estimations. In this scenario, both the client and the development team can be at fault. If you don’t provide sufficient data, the error margin for the estimation will increase significantly. Your partner’s team should actively seek the information they need, ask questions as they arise, and help you translate your industry’s lingo into a language that both sides will understand.
You underestimate your project’s needs. During development, it turns out that the project requires more work than what was specified in the beginning. This can involve additional features, localisations, integrations, multiple platforms or adjustments for higher traffic. Whenever you add something to the project during development, the estimation will increase, but it can be difficult to predict by how much if the new feature interacts with or depends on existing ones, which might then need to be rewritten.
Resources aren’t allocated properly and one or more of the lifecycle stages of your app suffer for it. The most common version of this scenario is when you spend too much on development, and end up with insufficient resources for maintenance and promotion. The worst possible consequence is that nobody will see your project even though your app is complete and well-designed.
Conclusions and takeaways
Mobile app estimation is complicated and can only ever be as accurate as the information provided by the client.
There’s no easy way to judge how much it’ll cost to build your product — you need to sit down with an expert, establish project scope, make strategic decisions and base the estimation on that. At the same time, it’s easy to identify the factors that go into the costs of app development, and you can use this knowledge for your business’ benefit.
Here are the main takeaways from this article:
- If you need a complex service (like mobile app development or, say, building a house), you need to make precise specifications of what you want to achieve. Otherwise, the estimation you get won’t be very realistic.
- App development cost depends on both internal and external factors, as well as on your goals and choices.
- To plan your budget well, you need to create clear specifications and strategy for your app, including maintenance and promotion.
- There are simple ways to influence development costs, such as: starting with an MVP, hiring a good team that’ll build a coherent app architecture, and using an offshore company rather than a local one.
- You need to choose the right mobile development partner for your business. One with adequate mobile expertise and the ability to efficiently build your product. This will result in a fast development process with no major issues.
This article was first published on Jul 31, 2018
Originally published at https://www.netguru.com.
