How much does it cost to develop an app?

As a startup, you must have considered building a mobile application at least a number of times. Even when you know that a mobile application will have great advantages for your business, the costs involved in building one from the scratch might be holding you back for a long time. Nevertheless, when you finally decide to take the plunge into the world of mobile app development and start to window-shop for the services from different mobile app development companies, the technical jargon used by the prospective agencies for the steps involved in app development and little to no knowledge of the mobile app market can make everything quite confusing for you. On top of it all, as you go from one agency to another, the steep difference between their rate-cards might make it all the more so. In short, there can be a lot of subjectivity involved, while pricing a mobile application as the cost of building it from the scratch depends on a variety of factors. In this article, we have tried to throw light on a realistic approach to pricing your mobile application, while duly considering all the factors that have a role to play:

How much does it cost to develop an app?

The cost of an application is a product of the number of features required to be built into the app and the number of hours needed by the resource to build each app with the hourly rate of the resource working on the project.
Hence, the most basic way to calculate the cost of an app is: (Number of features needed x Average time needed per feature) x Hourly rate of the resource
Therefore, App Development Cost = Total Development Time x Hourly Rate of Resource

Other factors to consider:

1) Where is your agency geographically located?

The median cost per hour of developing an app can be widely different in different regions. In this way, it is important to understand the variations in hourly rates before we estimate the total app development cost.

2) How feature-rich is your app?

What all features you plan to include in your app, whether your app will be with or without a web server, will it include any third-party integrations, admin dashboard, and/ or will it be making use of the popular hardware components such as Bluetooth and GPS etc. are the feature related components of your application that will determine how costly your app may finally turn out to be. In this case, a special mention also goes to the gaming apps since pricing them out rightly could be a bit tricky owing to a rather wide range of complexity that can be involved while building them. In any case, it always helps to have a crystal-clear idea about what your project scope is and what your expectations from the app in terms of short and long-term goal of your business, are.

3) Who’s going to make your app?

It is also a huge deciding factor as to who is going to build your mobile application. Depending upon your budget, funding for the app and the time constraints, you may consider any of the available options such as hiring a full-stack in-house developer, hiring an in-house app development team, hiring a mobile development agency or hiring freelancers. Then again, it depends upon what your long-term plan with the app looks like. For example, if you have sufficient funding and you are planning on expanding on your MVP in the future, it is a great idea to hire an in-house app development team or a full-stack developer. Whereas if you are a bit pressed on your budget and time, it can usually be a good idea to consider development agencies or freelancers with reliable track-records. Regardless of which option you choose, it is important for you to ensure the protection of the proprietary information shared with the development team or the developer. This can be accomplished using a non-disclosure agreement.

4) Do you want to make an iOS or Android app?

The cost of your app also depends upon whether you are building it for Android or the iOS operating system. Though there is not much difference between the two if we compare on the work performed per hour basis. However, it is generally observed that since the android devices have a wider variety and the sizes of the screens may differ drastically, both the design and the development of the Android apps can be quite time-taking – at least 2-3 times that of the iOS app. This is the reason why when we multiply the per hour rate of the developer with this 2-3 fold time, the resultant costs corresponding to Android apps come out to be way higher. In this case, a good strategy can be to work on the iOS application first and later, explore what best can be done to minimize this time taken for the android application.

There can be other factors as well which may include the cost of support (hosting), marketing and advertising of the app, the maintenance of the resources needed for these and so on. This is roughly how you can go about estimating the cost of the mobile application development for your business.