Today, there are more than 6 billion mobile users in the world, which translates to almost 75-80% of humans using mobile phones during the day. Most companies are undergoing their digital transformation journey to create great and interactive experiences for their consumers and visitors. If you are on the same journey, you must have considered building an application for your business.
Building an app is quite challenging when you don’t have your technology team, and that’s where outsourcing companies and their services come to help. They provide you with all the expertise and support to build, launch, and maintain your enterprise apps. All this comes with competitive prices.
If you are looking to know the cost of building an app, you are at the right place. It could range from $10,000 to $3,00,000, depending on various elements. In this article, we will understand the cost of building some typical applications and the factors that influence them.
Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
Factors that Influence an App’s Cost
1. The complexity of the application.
If you are looking to build a simple app, it can cost you from $ 8,000 to $60,000 as there are lesser efforts in building simple apps. Simple apps are minimal, easy, small, and straightforward. Moreover, there are multiple service providers for building simple apps.
But if you need to build a complex application that integrates with various third-party service providers, other existing applications, and your organization’s infrastructure, the costs will be higher. It can go from $60,000 to $2,50,000, including all the resources.
Development teams calculate the complexity of an application by summing up the number of features you want to develop, the screens/pages inside the app, and how complex the business logic is. This will significantly increase the development costs as you keep adding features and screens.
2. Platforms that need to be supported.
The number of platforms that are supported by your app significantly contributes to the cost of building an app. Today, most companies are developing apps that are supported on the web as well as mobile devices. This makes it costlier as two different end products need to be made.
Moreover, if you create different apps for both iOS and Android, the charges will be much more compared to using native development frameworks. Native frameworks allow you to publish apps for multiple platforms from the same codebase. If you want to build a native app, you may end up spending $40,000 to $150,000.
3. Development approach.
The development approach also plays a role in influencing an app’s cost. When you use waterfall for the development approach, you might spend more time developing the right application. Compared to that, agile is a better and faster approach to developing and shipping enterprise applications.
See Also: Top Business Apps to Follow In 2024
4. Hiring options
Moreover, the type of teams you choose can also affect the costs. When you choose to outsource the development to an offshore service provider, you can save significantly on development costs. Remote workers and freelancers are also a good choice when you are looking to minimize costs. But if you work with in-house developers or service providers from the same region, it is going to be costly.
5. Code reusability
When you have similar apps in your enterprise or when you have an existing application that you are migrating to something new, it is a good idea to utilize an older codebase. This allows teams to move faster between releases and reduce development costs, as lesser modules need to be developed from scratch.
Elements like login, signup, etc., can be reused across your enterprise apps, and this will decrease your turnaround time for apps. If you build everything from scratch, you will end up spending more time, money, and effort on building the same elementary things.
6. Size of the development team.
Another big factor that affects the cost of any app development project is the size of the development team behind it. A development team consists of project managers, developers, QA associates, and business analysts. The bigger the development team, the more the cost of building an app.
When you outsource your app development project to service providers, you may end up hiring a bigger team than required. Hence, always assess your requirements first and then finalize the team size, as you will be billed for each person on the team.
Moreover, if you are building a simple application, you don’t need a huge team. It is better to hire a dedicated developer or a capable freelancer for simple, less complex apps.
7. App maintenance and upgrades.
App maintenance and upgrades are essential in keeping the application up and running on production servers at all times. Without proper maintenance, your app’s performance will become sluggish after some time, and that will result in an awful user experience. Hence, when building an app, you should calculate extra for maintenance and upgrades to keep your app running.
You may spend up to 20% of the app’s total expense every year on maintenance. Suppose you build a $100,000 app; you may spend up to $20,000 to maintain the application.
8. UI/UX design expenses.
A great UI and excellent user experience are the core of successful applications. If you are looking to build apps that succeed in the market, you will have to spend significantly in designing the user interface and experience of the app.
UI/UX designing takes time, and it is costly, too. So, when you go with innovative designs, they indeed influence the app’s development costs. UI designing can cost you anywhere between $ 3,000 to $30,000, depending on the designs and designers you work with.
Knowing about the various factors that influence the cost of building an app, it is time to understand the approximate costs of building apps.
Approximate Costs of Building Different Apps
Cost of building an eCommerce app.
eCommerce apps are the talk of the town. Every company that has a large customer base is looking to tap into eCommerce markets by developing their eCommerce apps.
These apps allow users to search through products, add them to wishlists, purchase products, and deliver them to their homes. They also have features like viewing past orders, providing ratings, reviews, and many other things. eCommerce apps are feature-packed and are also integrated with CRMs and payment gateways for analytics.
To build an eCommerce app, you may end up spending anywhere between $50,000 to $100,000 based on the technology and other factors.
You might want to check out: Top Travel Apps for All Travelers in 2024
Cost of building social media apps.
Social media apps are available in plenty, and the target audience is quick to catch up to newer social media apps. Today, everyone loves connecting to the people they love, and social media surely plays a significant role here.
Most apps have common features like profile management, sharing photos and videos, messaging, and push notifications. If you need these generic features, the cost of building an app can range from anywhere between $60,000 to $200,000.
Cost of building ride-hailing apps.
The future of commuting is ride-sharing and ride-hailing platforms. And if you can tap into this market early on, you can surely become a leader in the space. Ride-hailing or sharing apps come with two different apps, wherein one app is for users to request rides, and the other app is for drivers to accept rides and run their vehicles on the app.
Some common features of such applications include SMS and push notifications, payment management, geolocation and routing for rides, requesting rides, profile management, etc.
If you spend around $50,000, you can surely build a nice ride-hailing app to start your business.
Conclusion
You can surely build great applications by building your teams or outsourcing your app development with a great offshore service provider. This article will help you get an overview and evaluate the cost of building an app in 2024 so that you don’t pay more in the pursuit of excellence.