How Much Does It Cost to Make a Mobile App for Your Business in 2021?
What factors influence the mobile app development cost
What is the cost of mobile app development for business? You won’t see a precise price tag for an application like the one you see in any shop for some shoes or any other goods. The cost of mobile apps or websites depends on your goals and the end vision of a product.
When trying to answer the questions like “How much does it cost to build an app?” or “What does the mobile app development cost depend on?” you may find various calculators over the internet. But they show a pretty approximate estimate.
Surely, spending a fortune won’t guarantee success. Likewise, you won’t become a professional cook after spending tons of money on kitchen supplies. It all requires professional guidance and expertise. That’s why you need to take into account your technology partners — a team that will develop an app.
Besides that, there are other factors to consider:
- Development team hourly rate
- Targeted OS
- App features
- The complexity of implementation
- App design
- Selected technology stack
- Project management
- Quality assurance
Based on these and many other factors, the mobile app development cost may range from $5,000 to $300,000 and beyond.
Let’s see what really goes into the app cost and how it actually works!
Bonus: Find the link to the original blog post about the app development costs of well-known startups in the end of the article!
How Much Does an App Cost to Develop Worldwide?
The location and type of your mobile app development provider greatly influence the mobile app development cost. You can hire:
- an independent freelancer
- a mobile app development company
- a big corporation
Obviously, from each point to the other, you will see a significant difference in the prices of their services. Although an independent contractor may be the least expensive solution, there are some factors that will go against such a choice. So you should seriously consider the pros and cons of the choice between freelancer vs software development company.
A big tech corporation may require the biggest expenses for software development. So the golden mean maybe a mobile app development company that will back you up with all the necessary technology challenges you may have in your business.
Besides that, the contractor’s location means a lot. As usually mobile app development rates differ greatly from country to country.
Estimations for mobile app development are counted mostly in per-hour rates. Usually, a mobile app development firm calculates the number of hours necessary to create an app based on your business requirements. As a result, the total number of hours is multiplied by the mobile app development rate and you get the total mobile app development cost.
Let’s see what you have on the table among the leading regions in the software development niche:
- India: $10–80
- Ukraine: $25–100
- UK: $50–170
- Australia: $50–150
- Canada: $50–250
- USA: $50–300
Indian developers are among the cheapest by the price though many customers claim to be not satisfied with the quality. The North-American, Australian, and Western European countries are more expensive, though provide quality services. And Ukraine tends to gain leading positions on the market due to the best balance of price and quality. Additionally, the mentality and time zone is more preferable for western clients.
There are many other reasons why most businesses prefer to hire Ukrainian app developers.
What Affects Mobile App Development Cost?
Once you’ve chosen your perfect software development company, you can not expect them to provide you with the exact mobile app development estimation offhand. Initially, a discovery phase will be conducted to gather your app requirements and writing the product tech specification.
Let’s figure out what greatly influences the ultimate mobile app development cost!
Features and Functionality
The app functionality is among the most crucial influencing factors on the app cost. The more features the product has, the more complex and expensive it is.
Let’s see the approximate development time and cost required to create common functionality at each development stage.
We’ll take the most widespread average development rate of $50 to calculate the cost of mobile app development.
How much does it cost to create a mobile application? Let’s start answering this question.
If you question yourself “How much does it cost to create a web app?”, go check the details in the article.
Remember, this table displays only core possibilities that you can utilize for your business. Among others are API integrations, geolocation tracking, social content sharing, etc.
Actually, your opportunities are limitless!
Customization of Visual Design
Another crucial part of any application is the UX/UI design. Let’s what goes into its cost!
As you can see, the basic app design cost of mobile apps varies from $3,300 to $5,000. It can evolve over time depending on your business objectives.
Platforms for Mobile Apps
Another point to be mentioned that the specified above rough estimation for a mobile app development includes only basic features common for each popular mobile OS — Android and iOS. Surely, if you need apps for both OSs, you may multiply that estimation by 2 and take into account that certain OS-specific features may be required for implementation if you wish to please your mobile user audience.
Read also: Native vs Cross-Platform Development: When Native App Wins
Structure of a Development Team
Surely, costs greatly depend on the location of developers, though the structure of the development team selected for your project means a lot. Let’s see who can make an impact on your app success.
A business analyst is responsible for the initial stage of product development. Proper mobile app development planning is the main focus here and requires gathering initial data, analyzing competitors, defining project value and potential issues, and writing detailed tech specifications.
UX/UI designers should analyze client preferences, create wireframes, and final app design.
Mobile app developers should create applications within described specifications for one or more platforms.
QA engineers should make sure the app is of the highest possible quality and meets all specified requirements.
Read also: How to Build a Mobile App Startup that Actually Makes Money
Project managers monitor and coordinate all sides of the project development ensuring everything is delivered on time and within the agreed budget.
The interesting fact is that in the IT world you can not only hire a whole development team but hire a specific professional from a software development company that provides IT outstaffing services.
Cost of Maintaining an App
The digital world doesn’t stand still, so after launch, every app requires continuous update and improvement upon new technologies released, app store changes, or further functionality upgrades. These costs make up to 15% for app maintenance every year from the initial overall project price.
Our Approach to the Cost Estimation
The above mentioned rough estimations for various mobile app development stages demonstrate the hours we allocate for the basic feature set.
So far Topdevs have delivered a wide range of digital solutions, therefore the whole mobile app development process is smoothly refined. It includes:
- Discovery phase where we discuss the client’s idea, gather requirements, and suggest possible improvements from the edge of our tech expertise.
- Concept & design where we define the main concept of the product, create various app prototypes, and construct a solid architecture of the application.
- Estimation & planning where we make accurate development plans and present well-thought estimations with deadlines for each development stage.
- Product delivery is the biggest part where we actually develop a mobile app, test, and polish according to the project specifications.
- Support & maintenance where we help our clients to update, improve, and scale the application according to the emerging business objectives and market challenges.
Most importantly, our mobile app development team is always ready to provide a proper consultation, give tech guidance, and discuss the project progress upon request.
Conclusions
So what does the total mobile app development cost? As you see, it greatly depends on many factors. Precisely who develops an app, how complex its functionality, and which business objectives you wish to reach with it.
The total mobile app development cost varies greatly from $5,000 to $300,000 and continuously if necessary to upgrade.
If you have a limited budget, it is easier to start small with an MVP development. Once it gets recognizable on the market and you get additional funding, the mobile app development process can be continued.
Either way, a properly developed application can become very popular and bring great returns on investments.
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