4 Costs & Expenses of Mobile App Development

Have you ever thought of having your own mobile app but didn’t know how much developing one costs? Well, this article breaks it down for you. There are a number of factors that inform the costs of developing a mobile application.

These include the app developer company you settle on, your project scope, the back-end services required, platforms and devices it will run on, and the technology to be used.

Cost considerations for developing an app are based around three main areas: the ability of the app to attract users, the app manager in your organization, and maintenance and updating of your app. Specifically, the costs associated with the development of a mobile app can be categorized into the following areas:

1. Marketing

Mobile apps fail due to poor marketing. If the app does not have a defined market or lacks a clear marketing strategy, chances of it failing are very high. Marketing drives user acquisition and the mobile app growth. The extremely competitive mobile app market requires aggressive marketing and promotion. Marketing should be strategic and not an afterthought. It should be an integral part of the product cycle and not a knee-jerk promotional gimmick.

An awareness campaign should precede the launch of the mobile app as part of your marketing strategy. Some highly effective pre-launch marketing activities include paid advertising, press kits, teasers, quality blog content, social media campaigns, and traffic-pulling landing pages, among others. You should, therefore, have a marketing budget set aside for different promotional activities across various platforms to maximize product awareness and user acquisition.

2. Team and Cross-Department Costs

Developing a mobile app is not a one-man affair. It requires building a team of experts sourced from different departments. This involves coordinating these teams and leveraging their skills and expertise to come up with a market-ready mobile app. The teams include project managers, architects and designers.

Integrating the activities of various teams to ensure not only the development of a powerful product but also to include marketing activities that introduce the product to the market is pivotal to its success. The involvement of every department will depend on the type of your mobile app, its features, and goals. Costing the activities of the various teams into your mobile app development is therefore highly important.

3. Maintenance Costs

Once you are done with the initial launch, there is still more work to be done. You will need to budget for app maintenance and bugs fixing. You will also need to plan for upgrade costs as your mobile app evolves from one version to another. Planning for upgrades and maintenance should be a long-term strategy that covers the cost of new features and improvements as the product adjusts to the highly competitive mobile app market.

4. Upgrade Costs

Another area that will require adequate financial resources is continuous delivery to ensure the success of the app. Consumer demands and advances in the mobile technology are constantly changing. You can’t develop a mobile app and leave the matter there. You need to continuously tweak and adjust the app to respond to changing user demands and the ever-evolving mobile technology advances. This allows you to meet and exceed customer demands, monitor, and improve your mobile app to remain competitive in the market. To do this effectively, you should adopt a phased product approach when rolling out new features. The helps to project and plan for future costs.

Among the critical mistakes that most mobile app developers make is failing to plan for updates, ignoring cross-department related costs, and failing to factor marketing and promotional costs into your app development budget. At the end of the day, developing a successful mobile app requires a development and marketing strategy that is responsive to rapidly-changing user demands and technological advancements.