How Much Does A Mobile App Cost?

Apps help improve your brand’s visibility on the mobile platform. With the right app, you can translate your business goals into reality. You need to have a good idea and a good team on board to make the app idea a reality. If you lack either a good team or a good idea, you might face the repercussions in your app development. It is not as simple as it appears. You will need to put in efforts right from building on your idea to working on a decent strategy to actual execution. There are different people who work on different portions of the app development process. You will need to allocate your resources according to their expertise and the value they offer to the whole app development process.

Mobile app cost is dependent on the type of app you are planning to develop. If you are developing a native app, the cost will differ from that of a mobile web app. When you get down to finalizing a budget for the app, you need to consider the different resource costs, along with the hours they will put into the app development. Here we will chalk out the different phases of app development, and allocate the resource cost for the same to help you know the app development cost.

Phase 1: Ideation

This is the first phase of app development process. You need a good idea to start out. As a brand, you have to develop an idea that aligns with your business goals and business requirements. You alone can figure out the need for a mobile app, and what you aim to achieve from it. This is why ideation is the phase that belongs to the business. It is the first and important phase of app development.

Phase 2: Strategy Development

Strategy fine tunes your idea, which accounts for your app development cost. You will need to determine the features that you need to have in a mobile app. When you call for more features, then the planning involved is higher, and you need more resources to serve this purpose. What are the goals you are planning to achieve with this website should be clear before you begin with app development. With a good strategy, you will be able to evaluate the purpose of your app, the audience meant for your app, and analyze the actual needs of your app. This will help allocate the resources and time needed for your app development process. A simple app can be strategized in 30 hours while a complex app requires 150 hours approximately. Normally a single strategist is enough for app strategies, and it costs around $25 to $50 an hour.

Phase 3: Defining the Information Architecture

This is where your app starts to formulate and starts taking the shape of reality. You start designing the layout for the mobile app i.e. a blueprint diagram for the app, which will include the structural diagrams, wireframes as well as specification documents. You will define how the navigation will work, and how the interface will be developed for the app. The time to develop the wireframe depends on the complexity and customization involved in the app. This phase can take anywhere between 40 to 500 hours, and the approximate pricing per hour varies from $12 to $25 per hour. To define the layout, you need a 2 member team excluding the strategist.

Phase 4: Prototype Development

After defining the layout, a prototype helps understand how the interface would actually look like. This process will combine your strategy with the information architecture you have defined for the app. You can easily develop such prototypes using Photoshop to visually represent this architecture defined. It takes about 2 to 3 weeks to accomplish this task. It costs approx $15-$25 per hour to design the architecture. For simple apps, this is slightly less.

Phase 5: Mobile App Development

Coding of the app is one of the main tasks in app development. You will need a member team to complete this task, which will take about 1000 to 10000 hours for completion. This coding team is also responsible for testing and developing an error free app. It will cost approximately $25 an hour to develop a complex app.

The total app development cost from start to finish will be approximately $3500 to $5000 for simple apps, while for a complex app it will charge around $10k or $20k . You will need to pay more for apps with complexities.