Is it possible to reduce the development cost of your startup?
Development of the digital project is costly, and expenses can increase unexpectedly. However, if you are good at planning, aware of possible pitfalls, and doing the right steps in your project, you can avoid extra expenses by acting smart.
Why is development expensive?
- Large project team
- The process of development includes several stages:
the briefing, pre-project analytics, design, interface design, mobile development, backend development, technical support, and promotion.
From 1 to 3 highly paid specialists are involved at each stage, therefore, even adding up the cost of employees for the company, with an average project duration of 4 to 6 months.
We offer you to follow this guide and ten tips to reduce the development cost of your project.
1. Know your target market and audience
If you know your customer and market, you know exactly what product you need to create. The better you can handle this initial phase, the more likely you will capitalize on your software development effort.
2. Setting precise requirements is a must
Delivering proper requirements allows for estimating software development costs accurately and selecting the best approaches to implement your solution. Clear project requirements will make it easier for you to communicate with the team of developers if you build your application with a dedicated team, as less confusion in the task will eliminate the possibility of misunderstandings and errors.
3. Location
Different countries have different salaries. The average cost of software development in Eastern Europe is about $ 15–20 per hour while working with high-quality programmers in America can cost from $ 150 to $ 2,000 per hour. This is a tenfold difference between price and quality.
4. Adopt Agile
Agile will reduce your costs. Following this methodology, your project is transparent, remains flexible, and is always ready for change.
5. Implement DevOps
DevOps is another way to optimize your application development costs. A key DevOps approach is that this practice and its culture enable team members to interact with each other and with the client.
6. Don’t choose a fixed price and a fixed scope
There are three types of contracts in software development:
- Fixed-price contract
- Time-and-materials (T&M) contract
- Dedicated development team contract
It can be a failure if the price and scope are fixed. With such a price model, developers will try not to exceed the budget, and it doesn’t work well for the quality. Moreover, with this approach, it’s hard to adapt and make changes, which are one of the key components of Agile. The fixed price is only suitable for simple and predictable projects, if your project doesn’t seem like this soft, you need to choose T&M software development.
7. Adopt the Lean approach
The Lean approach is a versatile methodology that works regardless of industry. Flexibility is a crucial tenet of Agile, and intelligence and lean are critical tenets of Lean. Together, these two methodologies offer excellent opportunities for change and adaptation, provided that each idea is thoroughly tested before making the final decision on its implementation.
8. Launch your product with essential-only features
MVP is one of the Lean methodology’s key milestones as it allows you to show your product to the target audience, test it in a real environment, collect feedback and use these insights for further development and improvement. The essence of such a strategy is to get a real understanding of the market situation and assess the prospects of launching a successful application in real-time with minimal investment.
MVP allows you to show your product to your potential customer, test it in a real environment, collect feedback and improve your product. Consequently, you get a real idea of the market situation and can launch your product with minimal investments.
9. Consider a semi-custom alternative
Custom software development is costly since you need to build everything from scratch. Use this approach if your project is complicated, but there is also an alternative to reduce costs.
A semi-personalized approach is relevant if you want to decrease your price and still create a unique product. But you still need a strong team of developers because your solution will be partly built using the existing functions of other applications in the form of an application programming interface (API).
10. Prioritize usability over visual impact
It is very important to comply with a great design with usability. There is no way to separate design from usability because it provides a first visual impression that prompts users to continue exploring a product, close a web page, or uninstall an app.
Bottom line
The development process is costly, but following our advice, you can cut costs without losing the quality of the final product and find a team that wants to take on your project and bring you to the desired result.
