Producing a mobile app can be dirt cheap or highly expensive. Our guide will give you tips on how to save a few pennies when producing your own application.
Let’s Make It Cheaper
Sadly, there’s no magic way to radically reduce the costs. Plus, every app is unique as it’s made for a specific platform, has unique functionality, etc. So, it always requires different resources.
App development companies offer easy out-box solutions when it comes to building an app. But let’s see what costs are included:
- Platform. Averagely, it costs about $1,000 to make a simple app either for Android or iOS. But the price instantly rises once you need cross-platform compatibility.
- Tools. It implies technologies, which the app should be “friends with” according to your vision: AR, VR, cloud support, VoIP, integration of services like Google Maps, etc.
- Features. The bigger the feature palette, the more time and money it will take to make.
- Design. Is the GUI going to be ascetic, or do you want fancy animations and icons?
- QA. Quality assurance runs your app through a series of tests to exclude bugs and glitches.
- Vending. This implies fees charged by your vendor.
- Audience. Finally, you need to know the demographics of your target audience. It helps to calculate the net profit.
These basic factors are responsible for formulating the final price. As a result, developing a high-end mobile app can amount to as much as $200,000. So, how can you reduce the costs?
Ways to Make It Cheaper
Okay, here are a few ways to go easy on your app budget.
- Platform
It may sound obvious, but choosing the right platform is the first step to optimizing the development cost. We recommend two options: a) cross-platform b) a native app for one specific platform.
If you want to encompass the biggest part of the market, then cross-platform is your choice. Designing an app for both platforms from the start will help you decrease the costs by about 60-70%. And your app will have a uniform functionality/design for both.
At the same time, if you choose to make a native-only app — like exclusively for Android — you can save up half the budget. This is the best strategy if your app has any consumer demand or if you plan it to be an MVP (minimum viable product).
- Ready-made parts
There are plenty of libraries and frameworks for mob-dev: Sencha, Xamarin, Ionic, PhoneGap, and so on.
They help a lot by speeding up the development and giving you ready-made templates for backend (code) and frontend (visual design). They offer ready-to-use features that you won’t have to architect from scratch.
- Outsourcing
You could use a little help from over the seas, so to say. The freelance websites — Upwork, Simply Hired, Fiverr, or Toptal are crowded with IT experts of all sorts, including mobile developers.
You can hire one with a lower hourly rate than the US developers have. For example, Indian mob-devs averagely charge $10 per hour. But there’s a hidden rock here: the lower the price, the more QA you and bug-fixing might need later.
- Recycling
If you already have some sort of service — like a store price aggregator or online collaboration tool, you’ve won half the battle.
You can pull from your already existing system certain elements: API data, 3d party service integration, libraries and frameworks, templates, and so on.
- Priorities
Finally, pick only a handful of valuable features that your users will really need. It’s reasonable to roll out a more austere version of the app and add up more features later if the feedback from the clientele signals you to do so.
No App Trap
Follow our tips, don’t overburden your 1.0 app version with whistles and bells and you will reduce the production costs.