How much does it cost to develop an app is one of the most oft-asked questions, so I’ll just answer it right now! A typical app budget might be around $50K, but it depends. A simple app might cost just $5K to design and develop, while a complex enterprise-grade system might be a couple of orders of magnitude higher. It all depends on the complexity of the design and app functionality that you need developed.
The process of building an app is kind of like building a house. A developer might have some idea of ballpark pricing when you tell them “3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms”, but they’ll need to know the lay of the land and see some blueprints before quoting. Similarly, an experienced app developer can give you a rough ballpark estimate up-front, and an accurate quote after doing some scoping.
If you’re wondering what your app might cost to develop, head on over to our contact page and have a quick chat with one of the team right now! A 5-minute phone call is all it takes.
What goes into the price of an app?
Apps are made by a team of highly skilled designers, developers and support personnel. A small, flexible, highly up-to-date team like ours would use the latest proven tools and techniques to get the highest quality results.
We would start off with understanding in detail exactly what you are after. Quite often this involves helping our clients clarify how they might achieve their goals, and just what exactly is possible with the technology at the moment.
We then go through a design process, during which we aim to create a great, world-class user experience (UX) for your app. In the early days of the app economy, there often wasn’t enough attention to the UX design. Thankfully now, most people realise just how important this is. App users have access to not just apps designed in NZ or Australia, but to the best of the best around the world. This means they expect high quality.
At this stage we also start engineering the app function by function. We test everything as we go, until we have a working solution. Once the engineering and design are in place we stop and test everything from scratch again, until we are satisfied the app is working correctly. Then we give the app to our client for a test drive until they are satisfied. Once the client is satisfied, it is time to write up marketing descriptions for Google Play and the App Store and release!
What does it cost to maintain an app after launch?
Typically apps nowadays are always on and connected to the internet in order to enable saving user data, connecting users to services and to each other. In order to enable this, we would use a secure and proven hosted server for a small monthly fee. The server can start off really small and scale as your app usage grows. It’ll typically cost under $10 / month per thousand users.
What about future changes and enhancements to my app?
We always aim to build a long term relationship with our clients, so enhancements are just part of the package. We would typically work closely with you on a product roadmap and as you execute your plans and get feedback from users we’ll happily prioritise the work that’s most important to you.
