Are you looking for hidden cost of mobile app development? If you are going to invest in the process of mobile app development – you must be ready for all its expenses. And, having a piece of good knowledge about all these expenses would be a safe bet to avoid financial crises later on. Let’s dive into the cost details so we can show you how to reduce your mobile app costs up to 70%.
Does your business really need an app?
Imagine you go to a coffee shop, entering a shopping mall or wandering in town, have you seen so many people carrying a smartphone in their hands? These days it is so convenient for consumers to shop, communicate, update news, entertain, work… with just their mobile phones. A custom mobile app for your business not only helps you serve current customers but also attracts new customers, increases competitiveness and brings high profits to the business.
Building a quality-oriented custom mobile application that helps you achieve your business objectives. Hence, the answer is: You obviously need to develop an app for your business. If you don’t have an application targeting mobile users, you are losing out on great growth opportunities because mobile users have increased significantly and your competitors have already moved forward to develop one for their customers.
Learn more: How much does it cost to build an app?
What does “hidden costs” mean?
hidden costs of mobile app development
Hidden costs are unforeseen expenses added. Expenses that are not normally included in the official price e.g. maintenance, support, and upgrades,… How about hidden cost of mobile app development?
6 Hidden Cost of Mobile App Development you might face to
The core issue here is that development is just the tip of the iceberg. The app lifecycle consists of development, deployment and maintenance; most people only focus on the development, so the Hidden Costs of Mobile App appearing in the latter two phases surprises them.
hidden Cost of running a business
1. Cost of App Designing
Much the same as development, UI/UX design cost relies upon the project complexity. In a nutshell, the more hours an app designer requires to complete the task – the more this stage of app development will cost you.
Generally, the process of designing a quality app takes from 50 to 200 hours for simple and complex applications respectively. But, if you require an application for Android as well as iOS – you need to work on two designs since these platforms utilize diverse design standards and languages.
No doubt, it takes 50-80% less time to make the designs for the second platform if you are done with the first one successfully. Also, keep in mind that if you require a dedicated application design for wearables or tablets – it will be a separate cost.
2. Cost of Functional Services
Functional services are those needed to execute the functionalities and features of your app.
While your developer may provide you with certain functionality, it will not work unless you subscribe to a service that will provide a delivery mechanism. These services may cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars per month, and the number of such services you may need is almost endless.
View more: Must-have Features of a Car Booking App
3. Cost of App Testing
Before your launch, I’m sure you want all the bugs were found and fixed. To check whether your application functions properly on various operating systems, devices, and screen resolutions – will require testing.
It’s important to note that without appropriate testing you are at risk of launching your app with low quality and that will negatively influence your app’s performance and UX.
[su_note]At InApps, we provide testing services for every app we develop and the cost for it comes under the cost of developing an app that we charge.[/su_note]
4. Cost of App Maintenance (DevOps)
We’re talking about IT-specific maintenance costs for infrastructure: data storage, CDN, and image data will all require some level of monitoring and maintenance.
App maintenance is required to fix those issues and bugs that show up over time or the ones that weren’t found before the app launch. Aside from these, it’s required to set up your application for the next operating system versions.
But, how much does app maintenance cost? As per statistics, expenses of maintaining an application take up to 20% of an application’s total budget yearly. For example, if your application costs you $100K, be prepared to spend up to $20K on its maintenance every year.
Mobile app maintenance costs
5. Cost of Refactoring
Refactoring is another side of maintenance that’s worth highlighting on its own. The idea behind refactoring is that you write code that’s just good enough to pass basic testing, compliance, limitations, or something else. Then you go back and clean it up at a later time.
Here’s a simple visual explanation of how refactoring works. Some of your code that was put in during development might have been “good enough” at the time. But as you scale, it must be rewritten to manage the new traffic load as your business grows.
Here’s another analogy. Let’s say you have a commercial printing press company. Your main printer is currently printing 5,000 flyers per day. It starts to malfunction, so you fix it with a “band-aid” solution. You know that your fix will get the machine back in action to continue producing 5,000 flyers per day. But if you ramp up to 10,000 flyers, the band-aid won’t be sufficient. When you get to that number, your daily business just doubled. But it comes with added maintenance costs that you need to plan for.
6. Cost of Hosting
These costs are incurred from hosting the servers for your software. You’ll have infrastructural components such as email servers, push notification servers, analytics servers, integration servers, and other servers depending on the type of app you’re developing. Most likely, you’re dealing with a company that delivers you a product or SaaS that you’ll pay a monthly fee for. Or you’re hosting the software somewhere in the cloud with a company like Amazon Web Services. There will be a monthly fee for this type of hosting as well.
Learn more: Loyalty Platform SaaS
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Don’t be fool with the cheap offer
A minimum app development project is about $10,000 and enterprise mobile app development cost is much higher depending on requirements. Hence, if any companies give you a cheap offer, be careful, you can get in a large cash trap of hidden cost of mobile app development.
At InApps Technology, we still take the projects which are around $5,000 to below $10,00 in case it is a pilot project and have a roadmap for the next phases.
Could you build an app with no hidden costs?
Why don’t you join an IT Tech company like InApps that had experience as well as a professional process to transform an idea to become a unicorn? You can benefit from our outsourcing software development services and offshore development team at the same time.
With InApps, you can save thousands of dollars (reduce up to 70% of IT cost or only from $20,000 to $40,000/project). We always offer end-to-end services with:
- Transparent cost and commitment.
- Free consultation and completed proposal.
- Free design mobile application concept.
We’ve already had +10 years of experience in mobility solutions, designing and developing many kinds of mobile app for the international startup, SMEs & enterprise in all industries such as heallthcare, dating, gaming, payment, Food & Restaurant,…
Reliability is one of the elements to make the best decision! Hence, we shall show you our reputation via our case studies.
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Let’s create the next big thing together!
Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.
