How much does it cost to build an app?

How much does it cost to build an app? If you're thinking about outsourcing the app development of your project you may be surprised by the range to outsource an app developer. The cost estimate to develop an app and create something custom for your business ranges based on the features you need.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:47 Sections of a mobile app
1:27 Example application
1:50 App Estimations
2:50 Costs per hour ranges
3:41 Architecture and the impact to cost
4:24 Typical Costs
5:30 Long terms app cost considerations
6:08 App Costs vs. Company Revenue
I’ve built mobile apps for over a decade with millions of downloads. I’m going to give you the formulas that app developers use from the worlds leading mobile development agencies to figure out what an app costs.
I’m also going to tell you why you some apps cost thousands and others cost millions to develop and how to manage your costs. Let’s get into it.
Whether you’re building an MVP an e-commerce app for your startup or you’re building a polished product for a Fortune 500 company, the cost of an app can range in price from thousands to millions of dollars and how you design and architect about your product can impact that price a lot!
When building an app most app developers will break down the work required into three core parts and then produce estimates for each feature or component.
The cost to make an app is tied directly to the features and the platforms you need to support. The mobile application development cost will go up if you're building custom work for Android and iOS and they will go down if you're deploying a single solution, however there is a quality and experience trade-off.
One of the key considerations for app costs is the technical architecture that you choose for your engineering. Most larger-scale mobile apps are built separately for iPhone, Android, and web experiences. This means that these larger firms often have to triple the engineering costs for the front-end of the product. As you can imagine this can triple the costs too. For well-established firms, the trade-off is worth it and well-built apps and web experience provides for both smoother experience for all users and a more robust code-base
Some engineering teams, however, choose to use a cross-platform technology such as ReactNative by Facebook or Flutter by Google. These technologies allow you to more easily develop one core code-base and deploy across multiple platforms such as Android and iOS. These technologies are a good option for reducing initial costs but they come with tradeoffs in the user experience and on the maintainability of the code.
Now so far we’ve talked about the initial costs of building an app but in-truth most successful apps are thought of as long-term and annualized investments. While many people think of apps as things, successful apps tend to be core and critical to a larger business. Because of this, these apps have to be updated, enhanced, and improved on a month-to-month basis. If you’re app is tied into a core business you should consider budgeting for an annual expense that’s related to the size of your engineering and design team.
For smaller startups, the initial engineering and design team can be as small as two people but often mobile teams are 5-10 people. Larger corporations will often have dedicated teams ranging in size from a dozen to hundreds of employees.
Because these teams are operational year-round their budgets are also annualized. Larger companies can do this because they think of their mobile teams as a profit center that’s core to their business, rather than a one time cost.
While the price of an app can range wildly the impact that an app can have on a business is similarly large. Mobile apps can drive significant revenue for larger businesses and as more people are getting comfortable installing and using apps, the mobile-first trend may continue to grow.
#appcost
#appdevelopment
#developercost

[@johntremblay6552]

Good summary Greg. Another thing to be careful of is job shops optimized on project delivery / low cost that could leave you with an unsupportable lump of code devoid of a solid solution architecture and extensibility to build upon as a service offering or platform for your business.

[@aliciathomas456]

Thank you for sharing this video, this is very helpful for me when I was planning for the developing applications but I don’t have any idea how much I have to pay for that. Now I know that all depend on our requirements of features and many other things, so yes for me this cost is not exact but we can consider approx costing of developing mobile applications.

[@fksebati]

Nice! As you said, it can range a lot! Great examples. PS I used to have that same LG phone on the desk :)

[@HalfIdeas]

Oh cool! That was a shot of our old test collection of devices. We had a 50+ devices of all shapes and sizes.

[@jameswalkine6698]

I watched this five times.. awesome video

[@HalfIdeas]

Happy that it was helpful for you. Thanks for watching.

[@milandhaduk2002]

Nice for knowledge

[@user-zl5gi8sv7u]

Great content. I look forward to more

[@HalfIdeas]

Thanks again for subscribing and checking it out.

[@christinajones2155]

Ty!

[@manickn6819]

Well put together video. That coming from someone who paid for an App to be developed out of India.

[@A12Diary]

Are you saying that Indian is not the best place to develop an app?

[@manickn6819]

@@A12Diary not in my limited experience.

[@ChelseaTheBrave234]

I started working with a website called own my invention and just for the research aspect to see if it’s even possible and for them to have an attorney look at everything I want my app to have it’s going to cost me about 1500$ is this normal? There’s several different steps to the entire process but this is just for the research aspect

[@HalfIdeas]

Every project is different but your expectation should be that time=money. Assuming an hourly rate, I can certainly imagine that just the research phase of a project could take substantial time. If you're serious about this project consider getting a couple quotes to get a sense of what the ranges and teams end up looking like.

[@nepalibicyclerider6280]

I want to remittance business so how much cost remittance app and website

[@nikhil5642]

Hi Great Video 👍🏻 What if you have a great app idea but you’re lacking the capital to get it developed. What can you do to get the money?

[@HalfIdeas]

I have another video on pitching to investors and another one on how "Ideas are useless." You need to find a way to make some movement on your idea... I've seen people validate and prototype app ideas in a number of ways. kzbin.info/www/bejne/o2XKfpdth9xkptU and kzbin.info/www/bejne/n5-ZhaB4pNaFf68

[@nikhil5642]

@@HalfIdeas right. Well thank you so much. I’ll watch these. 👍🏻🙏🙌🏽

[@Yoflowanimation]

@@HalfIdeas hey I don’t know if you’ll see this. But I also don’t have the capital to make my game app but I do animation and currently working on making an animation to pitch my idea. I’m afraid they may steal my idea

[@HalfIdeas]

@@Yoflowanimation I have a video on “ideas are worthless”. It’s all about execution.

[@Yoflowanimation]

@@HalfIdeas been watching a few of your vids

[@leekmittens9343]

Greg, do you create apps ? If so can someone pay 💰 you to create one?

[@HalfIdeas]

I used to create apps but I sold my app development company. You can still hire my team to build an app but typically the apps are high-end. Former company was WWW.raizlabs.com the new company doing the work is www.rightpoint.com

[@perrinmatias]

do you recomend any team or company in india?

[@HalfIdeas]

I don't have a particular team recommendation but I do often refer people to clutch.co/ as a resource to research firms.

[@CyrusSabounchi]

Yeah. It took us 6 months to build something we liked. Unfortunately market didn't like it that much! Btw, Development firm is at least 3x more expensive than hiring the team.

[@HalfIdeas]

So true. Hiring a team is generally less expensive but finding the right team to hire can take a lot of time. It's always a trade off between speed to market vs taking the internal costs for a longer term. I've advised startups to go in both directions depending on their finance situation.

[@johnlamb4465]

How do I find a competent and legit offshore developer? I don’t want to be scammed.

[@HalfIdeas]

Recommend talking to other founders and get references from anyone offshore. I recommend Clutch.co as a resource to start looking for possible companies.

[@johnlamb4465]

@@HalfIdeas Thanks for the lead!

[@againsit1463]

Music of the background is so annoying

[@HalfIdeas]

Thanks for the feedback. It was an earlier video, I'll try to tune it down/off in the future.

[@natgenesis5038]

You can build an app for 25$ Canadian hourly

[@natgenesis5038]

2000h Android team for android native app 2000h iOS team for iOS native app.

[@shaylaciara6702]

What company?

[@natgenesis5038]

@@shaylaciara6702 in Montreal

[@sirpfa]

4 months to build One App? 😳

[@HalfIdeas]

Many apps took much longer. For larger fortune 500 companies we would often work for 6-9+ months for an initial release.

[@sirpfa]

@@HalfIdeas can you please tell me some examples of the apps that takes 4 months and the ones that take 6 to 9 months?

[@HalfIdeas]

​@@sirpfa We've worked on many projects - generally speaking startup MVP's would often take 3-4 months while larger brands like Costco, B&H, LL Bean took 6+ months.

[@sirpfa]

@@HalfIdeas i would like to have a chat with you. How can we arrange that?

[@HalfIdeas]

@@sirpfa I have a contact form on GregRaiz.com - I get a lot of requests so I may not be able to help everyone but feel free to drop me a note.