How Much Does it Cost to Make an App for a Small Business?

If you’re a small business owner, you’re competing with about 99% of the businesses in the market. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 99.7% of all businesses are small businesses; hence, it is crucial for you to stand out in order to attract customers and increase your ROI. While a small business has several benefits, it surely has some downsides such as lack of capital and resources, making it difficult to allocate a substantial budget to the marketing department.

This is where a mobile app comes into play. The primary purpose of a mobile app is to improve customer experience by providing easy access to all your products or services in one place.

According to research reports by SalesForce:

• 70% of purchases are influenced by the customer’s experience alone.
• Only 51% of businesses invest in mobile apps, compared to 82% of the customers who use mobile apps for communicating with a company.

Considering the statistics, it is apparent that not many business owners realize the importance of having a mobile app for their business. However, from a customer’s perspective, it’s one of the critical elements that influences their experience. Mobile apps provide you an opportunity to increase sales and retain employees by increasing customer satisfaction. A mobile app can also help you collect data to analyze consumer behavior in order to plan your marketing strategy and send them promotional push notifications to ensure that they don’t miss out on any new products or services.

Simply put, mobile apps can be used as an effective marketing tool to drive traffic and revenue to your business. Once you have decided to invest in the development of an app for your business, you might find yourself wondering how much does it cost to create a mobile app.

An exact estimate of the app development cost cannot be predicted without knowing the specifications of the project as the cost depends on the scope and scale of the project. Some apps may only cost $10,000 to $20,000, while others can cost $500,000+.

Many factors influence an app’s development cost, such as the complexity of the app, the platforms that you choose, and the development team you plan to hire.

Factors that determine the development cost of a business app

Let’s discuss the factors that influence the cost of app development for a small business.

• Complexity of the App
• The Development Team
• Core Features of the App
• App Design
• Number of Platforms
• App Maintenance and Marketing Budget

Complexity of the App

The complexity of the app greatly influences the cost of app development. You should write down your business goals and plan how complex you want your app to be. This step often involves a business analyst to determine the scope of your project. It depends on the kind of business you own and its unique requirements. A simple startup app can cost anywhere between $50,000 and $150,000 whereas a complex app with advanced functionality can cost around $250,000+.

According to Velvetech’s data on the development cost of different kinds of apps based on their complexity:

• Offline standalone app costs approximately $50,000
• App with moderate online connectivity costs approximately ~$80,000
• Chatbot app development costs approximately $90,000
• IoT or wearable application costs approximately $1,350,000
• Messaging application development costs approximately $300,000
• Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality app costs approximately $400,000
• On-demand app development cost approximately $800,000
• M-commerce app costs approximately $600,000.00
• Mobile social networking app costs approximately $350,000
• Enterprise mobile app costs approximately $500,000

The Development Team

The development team you plan to hire may have a significant influence on your app development cost. One key question that determines your app development cost is who you will hire to develop your app. A freelance team or an app development company or a silicon giant?

• Freelancer Teams

Freelancer teams should be your go-to solution if you have a strict budget. They usually provide cheaper services that cost around $50,000, but their services are limited compared to an established agency. If you want a simple app for your business with basic features, hiring a freelance team might be a good option for you.

• App Development Companies

If you have sufficient capital to invest in mobile app development, but do not want to go overboard with it, then app development companies may be your safest bet. Most established app development companies have experienced teams of developers, architects, QA engineers, business analysts, and so on. App development companies cost anywhere between $75,000 and $400,000.

• Silicon Giants

Silicon Giants like IBM, Oracle, and LSI Logic should be considered if you have no reservations regarding the budget and wish to build a top-notch app with state of the art features and functionality. Silicon Giants will cost you around $400,000 to $1000,000 to build an app for your business.

Core Features of the App

The core features of your app significantly affect the cost of your app development. Here is the cost estimate for some of the core features:

• User Profile & Social Login: Costs about $2,400.
• Localization and Multi-Language Support: Costs about $500.
• Chat: A custom chat feature can cost about $12,000.

A cheaper option may be to use a third-party chat SDK that costs about $2,400.

• Push Notifications: Costs anywhere between $1,500 and $2,500.

Custom-built push notifications may cost around $4,000 – $5,000.

• Offline Mode: Costs about $8,000 to $12,000.
• Mobile Ads: Costs approximately $1,600 to $2,000.
• App Analytics and Usage Tracking: Starts with $2,000.

App Design

App design makes up about 10-15% of the total app development cost. It can range anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000. App design plays a crucial role in attracting customers to your business. Imagine a poorly designed app claiming to provide the best products or services. Now imagine a high-quality app with aesthetically pleasing visuals claiming the same. Who are you more likely to believe?

Sales Training Tools For Small Businesses

Let’s look at the meaning of seal the deal with use cases. Every business needs sales calls & analytics, there are several use cases in sales that you should keep in mind for the better growth of your business.

UI/UX greatly influence the customer’s experience. A user-friendly interface with attractive visuals is essential for strong brand positioning.  Some of the tools used for UI/UX are:

• Invision
• Adobe XD
• io

Number of Platforms

The number of platforms you choose to launch your app on considerably affects your app development cost. You need to analyze where your customers are, whether they are iOS users or Android users. If you have an audience on both platforms, it is suggested to use hybrid or cross-platform development rather than native development.

Native development is used for developing an app for a single platform such as iOS or Android. In contrast, hybrid or cross-platform development is used when you want to build an app for both iOS and Android. The cross-platform approach reduces your cost by 10-30%, compared to native apps development.

Native app development costs around $1,000 to $4,000 for a basic app and $2,00,000 to $3,50,000 for an advanced app with hundreds of features. On the other hand, an average hybrid app development cost about $5,000 to $1,00,000.

App Maintenance and Marketing Budget

Business owners often neglect these costs while estimating the development cost of an app. App maintenance and marketing costs add up to become a substantial amount of capital; thus, these costs should be kept in mind while planning to develop an app.

• According to Clutch’s survey, app maintenance costs about $10,000 to $14,000 per year.
• Business of Apps suggests that business owners put aside at least $10,000 to plan a go-to-market strategy for their app.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, app development for a small business can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000+ depending on the features and functionality required by your business. In order to develop a successful business app, you need to determine the needs of your target audience and your business goals. We have provided you with a rough breakdown of the cost of developing different types of apps with several different features. You may also use dynamic QR codes to track, analyze, and retarget your customers. All you need is a dynamic QR code generator. You can estimate the cost of developing your business app using this information or contact us to get a free quote.