How Much Does It Cost to Make an App?

Mobile app development has changed the digital world like never before. Although we have had internet up & working since 1983, the World Wide Web has had no role in bringing portable convenience to the table. It actually happened when we got these phones and then moved on to smartphones and now finally found these apps that redefined convenience, right at the palm of our hands. At present, from small startups to big enterprises rely on their mobile apps for a fair share of sales. Not only these apps provide great interface to customers to know about and purchase commodities, they also act as a direct platform for communicating with the company, which means better user engagement. That brings us the answer to “Why everyone wants to get a mobile app for their business”. Here will understand Cost to Make an App in detail.

Things You Should Know Before Building a mobile App

Before even initiating the mobile app development process, you may want to know about some of the tips that you should keep in mind in order to achieve desired goals through your mobile app, some of which are:

• Carry out extensive and intensive market research. This will help you understand your market better, and include & frame the correct features in the app.
• Don’t lose track of efficiency in terms of time of completion, costs, resources deployed, progress reports synchronized with client.
• Create a plan and closely check its feasibility including every possible outcome that can branch out from each possible case.
• From what you extract from market research, create an overview of your target audience and check how the top applications in that space are doing, what features they are including.
• Test your app before dispatching it as it could be play a deterministic role in the success of your app. A poorly tested app may have flaws that will ruin the first impression an app gets to make through app distribution systems like Google Play Store and App Store.

Now as an entrepreneur or a mobile app developer, you must know the amount and type of expenses you may incur for buying or receiving a mobile app. Why that is important? Because if you are an entrepreneur, it could save you from paying extra, and if you are a developer, you wouldn’t end up spending too much on a particular component of the mobile app.

So this here, is a guide that will give you an idea of just about everything that you need to know about mobile app development. To make this more comprehensive, we have broken down the read into sections so that you can understand each and every concept involved, with utmost clarity. So without further ado, let’s begin.

Read more: Why Business Prefer IOS App Development in India for Excellent Results?

Factors to Consider When Pricing App Development:

Calculation Model:

Before discussing the components, let’s take a look at the ways we can calculate app development costs. Knowing this would help you big time in kicking-off app development process in the right direction from the very beginning, keeping away the possibilities of running out of monetary resources available for the app. There are different approaches in estimating the mobile app development costs based on the kind of criteria that surround. So in that way, there are three calculation models for app development costs and expenditures, which are:

• Price-based:

These type of calculation model is suitable for small and medium projects, and is suitable for companies with budgetary limitations. If you are an entrepreneur with a small market value and tight-fisted conditions, you would probably go for an app development company that uses this type of calculation model. Because of smaller scale operations, it is easier to track the development process, and hence, the expenditures. The project usually completes within the time frame agreed upon by both the parties, and the sum to be paid depends upon the number, type and quality of the features provided by the app. If you are using a price-based model, developing an Android app may cost you anywhere between $15,000 and $110,000, the lower limit applies to basic app and the upper limit applies to complex app. iOS apps, on the other hand, are a bit cheaper compared to those based on Android, and may cost you $12,000 – $100,000 depending on the level of functionality.

• Time & Material-based:

Apt for projects that are large and long-term in nature, and have a flexible budget, with fair possibilities of negotiation. The amount incurred is assessed on the basis of the basis of time spent on the project, and also the amount and type of materials used. It is advisable to use this pricing model if there are dynamic requirements involved in the project, and one can expect variable workloads. On the basis of time and material, developers and designers have different pricing tables. For an android app, the average cost of development for a basic app could lie within $50-100 per hour with 100-150 hours of development. For an iOS app, the price could be $45-90 per hour with the same amount of time investment.

• Dedicated team-based

When it comes to having a dedicated team to focus on a project, nothing beats a dedicated team-based price estimation model as the client and team provider work together to meet the set goals. In this case, the client controls the dedicated team provided by the outsourcing party, and in return, pays an agreed sum to the same. This type of system is quite organized and has no extra costs, which means expenditures always stays within what was estimated, as the compensation is calculated per employee. When it comes to dedicated team-based estimation, prices vary on the basis of project size and the company. This pricing model could be costlier than the other two, and may cost $50,000 – 250,000, inclusive of everything.

Now that you know what kind of pricing model you need for your requirement, you must have also noticed that this gave you an idea about the approach as to which type of resource you should hire to develop an app for your company. And as we have talked about the pricing model, it is time to look at the components your app would require, and also how much you would actually be spending on them.

Read more: Top Mobile Apps Development Trends that will Dominate in 2021

What affects mobile app development costs?

Platform:

As we are only focusing on the major platforms for mobile app development, the most viable options to choose from are Android and iOS, both of which are quite remarkable in their entirety. According to ‘theverge.com’, approximately 99.6% of new smartphones run come with iOS or Android. In terms of usage, while iOS has over a billion number of active devices in the world, Android is by far the widest operating system with over 2 billion active devices at present. But then you can’t say that one is better than the other as there are differences between the platforms in terms of purchasing power, number of paid and unpaid apps, revenue generation and many more. So, it totally depends upon you which platforms you want to go for to build your app upon. But before you finalize that, let’s take a look at some iOS vs Android facts that may help you form an opinion.

• Developing an app over Android platform costs 30% more than that upon iOS.
• Android apps need more coding on Java/Kotlin than iOS using Objective C/Swift.
• Android apps have to be tested against more number of devices compared to iOS with only a handful
• Most of the customers using iPhones are from USA and Europe, have high purchasing power and are thus are likely to spend more on App Store and in-app purchases. On the other hand, a report shows that Android users are usually not very affluent, have lesser purchasing power parity, and hence, usually go for free stuff on Google Play Store.
• The major sources of revenue for iOS platform are Premium apps and in-apps purchases, whereas Android generates revenue mainly through in-app advertisements and freemium.

Choosing the suitable platform for your app is an important when you are planning to optimize cost. While basing your app on Android could get you to pay somewhere around $8000-10,000, cost for iOS platform may lie in the range of $6800-10000.

According to Statista, these are the most popular apps available in the App Store in terms of availability.

Design:

Just as significant as any, design is one of the factors that operate at a deterministic level. More than what the interface offers, design is more of a feeling which may vary from person to person. However, the visual communication plays the same role for each of us i.e of delivering the underlying message that a brand or business needs its customers to know. There are different types of designs that are trending and are frequently used by UX designers in the mobile apps:

• Skeuomorphic:

In Skeuomorphic designs, the interface has more of a real appearance and is quite comprehensive at a glance. The objective behind using Skeuomorphic UX in mobile apps is to make icons and other functional points to behave what they look like; like real physical objects. There is minimum role of complex design in Skeuomorphism, hence this is the cheapest UX design practices in the market. At a glance, this could be quite comprehensive for users, except that it doesn’t have much scope of improvement, which limits the functionality. For example – a virtual DJ mobile app with disc and slider button to adjust volume and amplifications.

This type of design was, and still is, quite popular among basic app developers with a demand for elementary and straight forward design. Also, Skeuomorphic design didn’t do well when they had to be incorporated with apps that provide more technical solutions like those in banking & finance, telecommunications etc. For basic and specific apps, Skeuomorphic design is still quite a preferred one. And because Skeuomorphic has sort of fell out of fashion for Android, but is still alive on default iPhone interface, the cost of using Skeuomorphic design in your app could be from $4000 – 6000 of fixed price. If calculated in terms of hourly rate, Skeuomorphic design could take about 100 hours and cost about $30 – 50 per hour.

So, how much does it cost to hire an app developer? Again, it depends. One of the factors that goes into this cost has to do with the location of your developer.

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• Flat Design:

Another category of design is Flat type, which offers a minimalist interface and a much clean UX compared to Skeuomorphic. Other than the simplicity it offers, Flat design has lesser glitches, loads faster, is more organized owning to its hierarchical order and much more. Notably, as Flat design is quite distant from realism, colour coding is one of the major UX elements in it, and provides a simplistic, yet comprehensive interface. Compared to Skeuomorphic design, Flat ones have twice as work for the designers as complex visual communication is an important player in these kind of designs. Because of an elementary feel, the prices to develop Flat design shall be quite low, but due to the complex structure of the solution this kind of design creates, the prices are higher than the former category. For developing a flat design suitable for your app, an experienced designer may take up to 200 hours, and charge $50 – 150 per hour. If you are planning to pay a fixed price, you may have to spend $11000 in total.

• Material Design:

Material design does what it says i.e it acts materialistically in such a way that each element of it can easily be seen emerging out of something as it is brought upon, and collapsing into something as it leaves. The drawbacks of Skeuomorphic and Flat designs have been covered in Material Designs, which is by far the most comprehensive design so far, which makes it quite costly to afford for a small business. Although it requires exclusive coding and extra headache for the developers to happen, Material design has solved the biggest problem that Flat design has had for years i.e lack of a logical flow that adds up to how easily a user can understand the app.

As this type of design is trending these days, and consequently, is quite in demand, a designer may charge $100-150 per hour and take up to 400 hours for final submission. Or maybe if you’re comfortable with one-time payments, you may have to spend anywhere between $20000-25000.

Read more: Get a Key to Attract Customers with Android App Development in India

Identify what type of app you’re building:

Type of App:

Choosing the right type of app makes a big difference in your app development costs. However, the type of app that may suit your circumstances depends on your requirements, especially, on your budget. Although the type of app doesn’t affect your mass reach directly, the type of features an app is able to provide, indirectly affects the number of people using your app. There are two types of apps that are available in mobile app development space:

 

• Native

Building an app on a native platform simply means you are building the app exclusively for a platform, which allows the users to makes full-fledged use of the capabilities offered by their phones. The apps that you build on native platform are called native apps and are highly-functional compared to the other kind that we will talk about after this section. Go for native app if you are aiming for:

• Advanced user experience
• Loads of hardware-dependent features
• More detail in each section
• Advanced UI interactions
• Unique and Remarkable look and feel
• Advanced functionality

But just like anything, it also has a set of cons, such as:

• Quite expensive
• Development duration is quite long
• Lack of uniformity on different devices

The cost of developing a native mobile app may vary according to the size of enterprise and throughput, but on an average, the price of development ranges from $30,000 – $250,000.

• Cross

Cross platform app is an alternate and more economical way of developing an app. Since cross platform apps are configured for different platforms, they are configured a little for each, and consequently, not native to any. These type of apps support reusable HTML5 codes which can customized for different platforms. This means cross platform based apps will have:

• Customizable base code that work with each platform
• Lesser time duration for development
• Way cheaper compared to native apps
• Uniformity across all platforms
• Easy integration

Some of the limitations of cross-platform are:

• Limitations to user experience
• Lacks exclusivity
• Faces issues on different devices

Compared to those on native platform, cross platform apps are quite cheap with development costs between $25,000 and $170,000.

Read more: Choose Top Mobile App Development Companies in India to Avail with best Results

Type of Development Team:

The kind of development team you deploy directly affects the time of completion, responsibilities, cost of project, progress synchronization and many other factors that determine the quality of work. There are two ways you can get an app developed: either with an individual or team of freelancer or a company that holds an expertise in doing that in a much organized and professional way. More than the technical aspects, the work ethics matter when assigning project to a development team. And from what is quite apparent, trusting a team of professionals from a company would always be a better option compared to freelancers, who may be talent at what they do, but won’t be able to handle large projects due to absence of a binding authority. Also the prices in case of a service provider company will at least be fixed which means you can plan your budget allocation for other resources. On the other hand, a freelance project can save you a lot of money, but involves high risk, unreliability, lack of answerability and more.

A mobile app is the reflection of a business’ potential, service capability and scalability. And because stakes are already quite high even in the mobile app market, your best bet is to pour in, the best resources in the development process.

If you are planning to get a mobile application for your business that can keep your business up with market trends and boost your sales, please feel free to reach us now.

Conclusion:

If ready to go for Mobile app development for business to increase the revenue, then SMACware can help you integrate your business with the latest AI Technologies for your mobile apps. SMACware, which is the best mobile app development company that has helped many global companies increase their business revenue. Apart from app development SMACware also expertise in Mobile Game development, video production, Photography, corporate branding, events & exhibition, digital marketing, WordPress Website Development, PHP website development, and web development services.