Recent surveys revealed the global tendency of increasing costs of mobile application development, in this post, we would like to refresh how much does it cost to develop an app. With the USA hourly rates for building an app of $50 to $250, the researchers count from $110,000 up to $500,000 for a first product version. What does a customer pay for when ordering an app?
List of main factors influencing an app development cost:
- Developers’ rate and project timeline
- Application functionality
- Number of end-user devices and mobile platforms (phone, tablets, wearables, Android, iOS, etc.)
- Content, design, and user experience source (customer produced or developed by a contractor)
- Back end creation or API integration (if needed)
- Third party integration (databases, payment systems)
- Application business models (paid subscriptions, in-app purchases, free, hybrid model)
- Management and operational expenses (research, maintenance, support, post-release costs, updates, and improvements)
- Quality assurance.
Quite an abundance of parameters. It is also important, who will be set as a developer. A customer may own his local development team, may hire a freelancer, or contract an agency or dedicated offshore devs.
Every approach is risky. Your company developers team on site is ready to implement your ideas, but they may perceive the project a bit one dimensional, or be experts in a different technology. A freelancer expertise may be not the same as an expert team, and project timeline may extend because one person is developing. On the other hand hiring a freelancer may be a money-saving solution.
Contracting the inshore agency or offshore developers opens you much wider perspectives, but requires a budget. Working with an agency, you can manage your development process in a more free and flexible way. You can ask a contractor to develop all the stages or outsource only some of them, like QA, for example. You can order content creation or do the design, images, user experience and so on yourself, and agency again is the good choice in such a case. Software development company also give you a chance to select the methods of work. It may be the waterfall model when you move step-by-step according to a plan towards the application release. On the contrary, there is agile approach when you solve the tasks as soon as they appear, changing and improving the details in the development process. When it comes to money, there is an option again. A contractor may offer you a fixed-price contract for the whole project or a time and materials estimate for development. Hiring a development company is the most expensive solution from the listed, however, the most reliable well. With agency schema, you can choose a local company, or outsource the project to offshore developers. In-shore companies are easier to start, and they seem to be more convenient to negotiate, but their rates are high. Remember? In the USA, the hourly rate for software development vary from $50 to $250, and it means that the average software development cost is approximately from $110,000 up to $500,000.
Outsourcing your project to an offshore company may be the key solution to protect project budget from overrun. The lowest rates are in India — $3-$60 per hour. The next comes Eastern Europe, where rates range is $20-$150, then goes Western Europe with its $30-$175 per hour. The Australian rates are higher and climb to $50-$150. Among the mentioned, Eastern Europe gained the reputation of a boosting IT-hub due to talented experts availability, convenient location, moderate rates and peer-to-peer communication. Ukraine is a right country to outsource. Ukrainian IT-community is constantly growing, the number of IT companies increases, the quality of delivered solution is proven by worldwide corporations contracting Ukrainian companies. Ukraine is the country, where several famous startups were born such as TemplateMonster, Grammarly, Magento and others.
How much does it cost to outsource the application development? There is a simple way to get the estimate for your project, use an online Calculator http://pricetodevelopanapp.com. Series of questions will guide you through the development progress in less than 2 minutes. You will get a rough quote for an application from Rozdoum, the Ukrainian software development house, verified as a reliable partner by Extract. Lift your business, work with Rozdoum!
