How to determine the cost of a mobile application
If you have come to the conclusion that you need a mobile application, your next step will most likely be to find worthy developers. The issue of pricing when ordering development is very relevant, and there is one feature here - a wide range of prices on the market. The main reason for this variety of prices is the different rate per hour of work required to get a good result from the development team. It is important to note that only in rare cases can you get by with one developer.
Once we have received a proposal to develop your project, we strongly recommend that you do not consider price alone. Experts do not set a price without any logic. Basically, the cost of creating a mobile application depends on the number of hours required for development and the amount of work, including the design of the application. Based on your initial description, an estimate is generated based on three main factors:
List of the most expensive components in app development
- Support for multiple platforms and devices
- Number of UI elements and custom animation
Professional IT companies take the task of studying the brief of the client seriously and try to get as much information from it as possible in order to make the most accurate estimate of the hours required to develop the application. After that, the number of hours is multiplied by the cost of an hour of work of a specialist, and from this the budget required to complete the project is determined.
The most expensive items to develop
- A large amount of data, screens and actions in the application significantly increases the work of the designer and layout designer of the project
- Backend - the server part of the system that stores the databases and business logic of the project and transfers them to the client side via API
- The control panel with which you manage the content, users, reports, and other data of your system.
- Several types of clients that use the application - for example, if you make an application like GETT, you will have a customer and a performer, so you need to develop an interface for each side.
- Modern smartphones are equipped with hardware components such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, heart rate sensors, NFC chips, Bluetooth sensors, and barometers. Their use adds a new and not a small cost item to the development of your application.
- Recently, AR (augmented reality) and facial capture technologies are very popular and are the most expensive of all. Therefore, we recommend that you evaluate your capabilities before starting development.
- Often a mobile application needs to be integrated with third-party libraries, frameworks and services. For example, payment systems, accounting software, CRM and chats.
- The number of supported devices and operating systems - often customers treat this expense item as something banal and expected, but it is worth considering that developing an application for both iOS and Android increases the cost of development. Also adapting to tablets can also increase the cost by up to 75%. In addition, even supporting older versions of iOS and Android can increase the cost of development by 1.5 times, and this is due to the fact that older versions have performance limitations and are often not updated and developed.
We recommend that you do not try to use all solutions at the same time, but start with the most popular models, and then, through analysis, refine the applications if necessary.