All About App Development Costs for Mobiles
Do you want to learn about app development costs? If you are thinking of taking your business and service to the next level and connecting with your audience, creating a mobile app may be your answer! But how to go about the app-building process? Will creating an Android/iPhone app be worth your time? Is the cost of creating an app affordable?
Not all apps are created equal, and different companies have diverse requirements. This, in turn, translates to fluctuating costs. To give you an idea, Uber obtained $200K as a start-up fund, while Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app, received $500K for development.
It sounds costly, doesn’t it? However, the cost of making an app justifies itself when you tally the hours in app development, testing, and upkeep required for an app that will be (hopefully) used by an increasing number of users if it gains popularity.
What Affects App Development Costs?
Creating an app with appeal and function takes a lot of work. You need to hire an experienced team you can rely on. The following factors are important when it comes to calculating app development costs:
- Functional complexity and features
- Local app development team vs. Outsourcing
- App design
- Backend infrastructure and administration
- Support/app maintenance costs
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Furthermore, when calculating the cost of creating an app, you should also consider unexpected fluctuations that may arise while creating the app. While planning the budget, be sure to make room for such ups and downs! An app development team can give you a good estimate of the cost.
You can hire an app developer on an hourly basis, and the charges per hour will differ depending on the country. To make your dream app into a reality, you need to plan your app down to the last detail, perform market research, design mockups, and plan the UI design.
Once you know what your app will look like and what it will do, you can cultivate a landing page and begin the app development process. Then upon successful completion of the app, you promote and launch it on Play Store and keep up with maintenance.
How Much Does it Cost to Make an App?
Levels of functionality and development time
Creating an app can seem daunting at first, but it will be easier when you keep a clear goal in mind of what your app aims to do, its complexity, and the target users’ ability to navigate it.
Keep in mind the app-building efforts and time needed to work out the design and its optimization, which is necessary for a bug-free app.
Simple-Level Functionality:
The cost of making an app with simple-level functionality is around $12,500 – $27, 000.
Medium-Level Complexity:
With more bells and whistles. 5-9 months of app development. Cost of creating an app with medium-level functionality is around $32,000 – $48,000.
High-Level Functionality:
Complex in design, requiring more maintenance and support. Over 10+ months of app development time. The cost of making an app with high-level functionality exceeds $52,000.
App Content
The cost of app development also depends on what type of content your app will present, and the direction the app-building will go in. Is your app a simple presentation of data, also known as a table-based app? A dynamic app, which retrieves information from external resources with APIs and is tougher to develop?
Related: 20 Interesting Facts About Android You Didn’t Know
Perhaps you have a database app in mind, which is also very complex, processing and displaying data in a visually pleasing way with connections to all sorts of online resources. If you are thinking of creating a gaming app, it has the highest cost since it requires a lot of customization in design, interface, media elements, and of course graphics and animations.
All these elements should play nice with mobile phone hardware as well, and so a lot of attention to detail is needed. These elements also influence the cost of creating an app.
Whatever you decide, some common elements in all these apps are:
- Login pages and user profiles
- Notifications
- Social media linking
- Help and customer support
- Payment options
All these need to be secure and add to the mobile app development costs.
Visual Design
Your app could be the most useful, but is aesthetically pleasing? Can your customers navigate it efficiently? Creating an app is more than just code. A unique interface coupled with an attractive design can get pricey, depending on the elements you include such as the inclusion of themes, icons, effects, dark/light modes, and more.
App Maintenance and Support
Once your app is ready, you can test it to work out the kinks, which can help estimate the cost of making an app in the future and further maintenance. This is a continuous process as Android/iPhone operating systems update and elements break due to incompatibility.
Up to 20% of the app-building cost makes up maintenance, and costs increase after the app is released as new features need adding, code requires optimization, bugs pop up, or the app becomes unstable.
Revenue Generation
As we discussed throughout the above sections, the cost of creating an app, especially creating a high-level functionality app, can be high. So creating an app is a huge investment. For the success of your app, keep in mind what business model you would like to choose for it.
Your app can be free of cost or have a pro/premium version with more features. You can also simply make a full-featured app and make it available for a price, as a paid app
Two more options are to have in-app purchases or to support your app by featuring advertising. If you opt for the latter, go for unobtrusive advertisements that do not distract from the general user experience.
Deploying Your App on Google Play/Apple Store
Once your app is ready, unleash it on the internet! You can make it available on the Google Play store for a one-time fee of $25, set the price of the app, and select what regions you want it to be accessible in.
As you can see from the information we have given in this article, the app development costs will depend on several factors like functionality, features, and app design. So the final decision is in your hand!
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