You probably have two questions: “How much money does it cost to make an application?” And what does the price depend on?
On the web, you can find a few different websites intended to estimate mobile application development costs. However, they are nothing more than a marketing move to attract your attention with short questions about your requirements. Therefore, the estimate you receive will not show you the actual picture.
Simply put, the prices of a product can range from $2,000 to $250,000. Quite a significant gap!
Understand the Life Cycle of Application Development to Understand Its Price
To give you a clear understanding of how much an app costs to build, here’s a closer look at typical app development stages:
- Definition of business objectives
- Market planning and research
- Wireframe and storyboard development
- Defining the backend requirements
- Testing a mobile app prototype
- Visual interface design
- Full application test
- Launch of the mobile application
- Application success analysis
Developers must first understand your business goals. Then, based on the goals, they begin planning the development process and complete market research. Next comes the wireframes to outline the framework for your application. Finally, these steps help determine your backend requirements, such as API usage.
After developing a prototype, designers begin to code the visual interface and create visual elements. Finally, when encoding is complete, the application is tested, started, and analyzed. Each of these stages involves different costs and deadlines.
App Development Cost: Understand Your Budget to Build Powerful Apps
Application development cost is the number one question when starting a digital startup. So, how much should you spend upfront on building a fantastic app and scaling it to a business worth billions?
App Development Cost: Benchmarks
It makes perfect sense to launch a startup app these days because most of the population uses different mobile applications as part of their daily activities. However, what is the cost of developing a mobile app these days?
Amount of Time Spent on Mobile Apps
The most trusted studies in the mobile app industry provided the following quotes for app development cost and schedule:
- The average app development cost is around $ 15,450 (at a rate of $ 150 / hour). The total price of the application could even increase to $ 30,500 in the case of a complex functionality implementation
- The average minimum application development project is between $ 5,000 to $ 10,000. The typical cost to create an application is likely to be much higher
- The enterprise mobile app development cost is an average of $ 23,000
Regarding the application development schedule: more than 80% of mobile applications take more than three months to develop; 40% of applications develop in more than six months.
Moreover, the idea of your application, along with business and functional needs, influences the cost of application development.
Most Significant Factors That Determine the Final Cost to Create an Application
- Complexity and number of functions of the application
- Backend infrastructure and connected APIs
- UX / UI design complexity
- Inclusion of other brand visual elements
- Development approach (native, mobile web, hybrid, etc.)
- The number of platforms to develop (iOS, Android, web, etc.)
With over a decade of data at our disposal, most quality applications cost between $ 10,000 and $ 1,000,000. Of course, some applications will be less costly and others more. But, if you are looking for an application built with great design, superior development, and intelligent marketing, you will be somewhere in that range.
Thus, the costs vary. For example, there is a significant difference between hiring a freelancer, an offshore development team, or an agency. Similarly, an application requiring a built-in backend server or built-in APIs versus an utterly separate one can differ drastically.