How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Mobile App?

Good question! Let’s try to break it down.

Development Team

Mobile App Development companies base their pricing on how it expected to take to develop the app and the size of team needed to complete it. A typical team for a basic mobile project includes a project manager, a single developer, a designer, and a tester at a minimum. Depending on the scope and timing of the project, you may need more then one person in each of these roles. For example, many companies build an Android and iOS app in parallel, requiring at least one developer for each platform. Each team member typically has their own hourly or weekly rate based on their role and level of experience, although some teams charge a blended rate for all of their resources combined.

Scope

A well-defined project scope is critical in determining the price to build an app. Every single component of an app takes time to build, so in order to provide accurate pricing and timing, it is important that an app’s feature set be entirely planned out in advance. Some features are relatively easy and quick to develop, while others are more complex and take longer. Experienced mobile developers have a good sense of how long different tasks can take, and with some thought and planning, can turn a list of features into a quite accurate time estimate for completing an app.

Audience

When planning your app, a key component of the pricing is who you want to be able to use your app. The most important choice is which platforms you will support. It is very beneficial to release apps for both iOS and Android in today’s market; however, to save costs, many clients choose to start with just one platform. Another important decision is whether or not you will support tablets. Tablet support is a great feature to have in an app, but it adds both design and development time and cost to a project, as many parts of an app need to function very differently on a large screen.

Backend

Most apps these days are social, dynamic experiences. If your app needs to store data online, or allows users to interact in any way, you are probably going to need a backend. Backends vary immensely based on the needs of the app, from quick and simple scripts, to complex and scalable systems. Once you have created a plan of how your app will interact with the web, a development company can help you determine whether you will need a custom backend, or if you can use a third party service such as Facebook or Yelp to provide this information. In the tips and advice section below, we will discuss some other services that can help with creating backends.

Pricing Models

The two most common pricing models are time and materials and a fixed bid. If your project scope is well defined and unlikely to change, some companies will take a fixed fee to complete your project. Once a fixed bid project has begun, any change requests will need to be thoroughly reviewed and likely will add cost. Time and materials pricing is based upon the hourly or weekly rates for each person working on the project. While an estimated timeline will be provided, time and materials pricing is typically chosen when the scope of a project is large, fluid, or not clearly defined, and because of this, the timeline may change slightly as the project proceeds.

Timing

Appstem’s average mobile project ranges from two to four months, but we’ve done simple projects as short as a week as well as more complex projects that have taken over a year. We run a lean company and are able to keep our rates very competitive for having a team in San Francisco. Our projects typically start at $50,000 and go up from there.

Appstem

Our client list includes a mix of Fortune 500 companies and game-changing startups. We have built all kinds of products, from complex enterprise systems to cool consumer-focused apps and multiplayer games. We don’t offshore or outsource our work. Our team is what sets us apart and we believe that it is easier to manage, collaborate, and get things done faster when everyone is in the same time zone. Some of our clients include

Tesla Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, Cerner Corporation, Genentech, Enterprise Holdings, Zendesk, Lionsgate, Hearst Corporation, and Caesars Entertainment.

Tips & Advice

There are a lot of services, frameworks, SDKs, and other tools available to developers to help create apps easier and faster. Services like Parse provide a managed backend so that you don’t need to build and support a custom backend. They also provide analytics, hosting, and push notification features. Some other helpful services include Twilio (provides VoIP calling and SMS features in your mobile apps), Facebook Messenger (helps you build chat messaging into apps), Box (provides cloud storage), and MixPanel (provides a complete analytics platform to track and monitor your apps).

Other Options

Most clients would like to see their app on both iOS and Android, but this typically doubles development costs as compared to building an app for just one of those platforms. There are many cross-platform or hybrid frameworks that allow you to build one app and deploy it to multiple app markets instead of separately developing an Android app in Java and an iOS app in Objective-C. We have developed apps on all the major cross-platform frameworks including Appcelerator Titanium, Sencha, PhoneGap / Cordova, and others. Cross-platform frameworks are useful for lightweight apps, but we have seen many issues that affect the quality of the app when creating larger more robust projects. Typically, the sacrifice in user experience is not worth any cost savings from going this route. If you have any questions, give us a call and we can walk you through this in more detail.Your final options are reaching out to freelance or offshore firms, but there tends to be some additional risk, as one would expect. With an established agency like Appstem, you get a complete team of mobile experts including multiple engineers, designers, project managers, and QA testers. And that, dear friends, is priceless. Well, almost.

You can contact our mobile app design company Appstem to learn more.