#ClientSpeaks
Agicent makes App Development process painless with their industry knowledge, attention to detail and a professional step-by-step development system. No wonder Agicent is handling our Apps with millions of users for 10+ years!
Joshua Kozak
CEO and Founder of HASfit
#ClientSpeaks
Agicent makes App Development process painless with their industry knowledge, attention to detail and a professional step-by-step development system. No wonder Agicent is handling our Apps with millions of users for 10+ years!
Joshua Kozak
CEO and Founder of HASfit
An App development cost calculator is an online tool mainly offered by mobile application agencies that brings the estimated rough cost for the app you want to launch. The app cost calculator tells you how much does it cost to build an app. Although, the cost varies as per the device, functionality, integrity, UX and many other factors that we will be discussing in detail in this post. Meanwhile you can straight away use our app development cost calculator to determine your app development cost as we’ll be sending you a manual quote range and can also ask you more details in order to figure out a fixed cost of app development.
Now before, reading more about App cost calculator, have you taken the ABCD ride of mobile app development? Let’s the below notes if you are unaware of the ABCD route for App Development:
A is App Awareness: In the awareness stage, you identify how the App product or App service that you offer will be solving the customer’s problem.
B is Browse your App competitors: Before entering into the new app world, make sure you know your customers and competition well. You should be aware of what your competitors offer and what drawbacks they carry.
C is App Consideration: In the consideration stage, you now analyze the App market, the cost associated with your every step and figure out what revenue system will best suit your idea.
D be the App business Decision: In the decision stage, you have already made a few tough calls and want to proceed with the risk involved.
With the above introduction of this app cost calculator tool, you must have got certain clarity in terms of cost involved, features you want your app to have, the hourly rate of the human resources and the estimated time to develop your application. Now that we know what an app cost calculator does, let's now understand how it works. This app cost calculator tool will raise certain essential questions that you will be answering by clicking an appropriate option. Every question contains a cost driver that decides on the expense involved. Once you are done answering the details, you will get an email with the estimated cost of the app.
It is important to decide what sort of app you want to design. Do you want the wheels of your app to be the internet or do you want your app to benefit your customers even if the customer is unable to browse the internet (Offline App)? The above two questions play a vital role while deciding the mobile app development cost. Several other loops, features and important decisions are linked to the mode of operation you will be moving ahead with. Supporting offline app usage will also increase the app making cost.
As the mobile application has two well known segregated users. One being the iOS lovers and another the Android explorers. To develop both applications, you need to tell the app cost calculator the development method you want to proceed with. Do you want to have one basic single base code for both the devices or you don’t want to compromise on the speed and efficiency and hence you want to create two different base codes for both Android and iOS? Native applications will generally cost more but come with a lot of benefits in terms of higher App performance, App Scalability, and App integration with different services and third party APIs. While cross platform technologies like React native and flutter are also very good and provide you single code base to cover both major App platforms (iOS and Android). The scalability is equally good, however integration with third party services or devices can be slightly cumbersome compared to native app development methodology
Irrespective of a great backend, if the eyeballs are not stuck on the visual of the app, then your app is definitely not a success story to be heard. A great UI connects the users from your application which results in a great engagement. If you have ever used an App development cost calculator, you must have come across a question which asks what sort of UI/UX you want to keep. Some applications like to keep it basic, some applications add their own style & frame and some applications prefer animation. The more customization and animations are included in the user interface, the more will be the cost of the application.
After having a fair idea of how your market looks, you must have decided on App geo-localization, correct? Do you remember a recent ad from Amazon that says ‘ Now adding carts is easy because you can now choose your own language to browse various stocks on Amazon? This was done to convert more users into customers. As a brand, if you give the native language importance, your user base will definitely spike up. And considering the various languages in mind, you will be needing relevant customer support. If you develop the app in a modular way that considers the number of domains and languages you want to opt-in then the localization will add a bit more cost into your cost of app development.
Number of “unique App screens'' can have a lot of effect in determining the app development costs, even though they don’t show much “technical features or functionality” but only some information or output of a user’s input, the more unique screens you add the more app development costs that would attract. The more screens the app includes the more design, prototype, wireframing and development effort it requires and hence the app cost. Many screens will take longer both to design and to develop, and thus will cost more.
We can bring home the comfort or get the job done with just a finger tap. This ease also brings the threat. Hacking of the secured data of an App is often attempted by certain App hackers, hence to keep the crucial information confidential the security software has to strengthen the walls by going a little extra mile. The cost of securing the data varies on the security issues that one is willing to fix. If you don’t want to compromise on data security then probably you will opt-in for rigid security software that will add on more bucks into your app making cost.
Without a rigid and strong backend an app cannot do well. With so much personal information that a user shares with the application, it is really a tough task to keep it secure and encrypted. Here is where a cloud-based server shows its importance. The developers have to play cautiously while integrating an API in the app because, without a proper API integration, the app functionality might block and won’t even work irrespective of your several attempts. Hence a stable and strong backend holds the whole magic of functionality.
Sometimes you want the app to browse other tools or applications for unlocking certain functionality. For example: for simplifying the process of sign-up, you allow the app to continue using a google account or Facebook account, in case you need to integrate the app with a third party. The integration takes a long time to function appropriately, hence the more third-party application integrations are included, the longer will be the app development process and more will be the average app development cost.
App development cost calculator also gives importance to the number of features and functionality you want to keep. The number of features and functionality is directly proportional to the mobile app development cost. The functionalities also depend on the idea of the application you have. For example: If you want to design a Uber like app, then you will need Paypal or any other payment method gateway, message chatbot, push-notification, navigation, geo-locator and various login options. Each feature has a separate cost associated with it as they require several hours to function smoothly after integrations.
The more advanced features you want your app to have, the more will be the app making cost. The user interface is also a great cost driver, as the cost of basic App UI, Customizable UI and animations differ. If you want to incorporate technologies like Virtual reality, IoT, AI and many other advanced ones, then they may also have a separate price range respectively.
Ans: A food delivery app like one we’ve made known as BeachGrub – Beach food delivery App, usually have following major components –
An App for the Customers to order food, select food, get delivery updates, be able to pay, get discounts, repeat order, see their order history, see their delivery guy’s movement and so on.
An App for the delivery guy to receive order from the restaurants and deliver to customers, they get their delivery duty either from the platform of the App or directly from the restaurant and get paid according to the miles they travel and rush hour factors, to keep history of their jobs and total money made daily or during a given period of time.
An App or a web admin panel for the restaurants to receive orders from the customers, assign orders to the delivery guys, get paid, be able to offer discounts, be able to list their food items, pictures and pricing, can see total orders, can pay for premium listing etc.
A super admin panel or platform Admin panel (usually web) for the super admin to register or approve new restaurants, new delivery guys, be able to see all transactions, be able to take action, integration with customer care (chat or call), be able to change pricing, apply discounts and so on.
Notification module – which is absolutely important for a delivery app, where both customers, delivery guys, restaurants get timely updates about all actions on the app – new orders, orders delivery state, discounts, payment issues, payment done updates and so on.
So in order to crate a Food delivery App, you have to have all these component with a powerful secure database, cloud hosting, payment gateway integration, location integration and much more. Creating an App like this will cost approx. $ 40 K on iOS and Android, and go upto as big as $ 80 K depending upon more sophisticated features that you want to incorporate time to time. We advise to hire an App development team on retainer after the launch version of the food delivery app is done.
Ans: A dating app usually has following features -
So, if these are the features you're looking for, then an App for iOS and Android dating app can be developed in around $ 25000 to $ 30000 taking 15 Weeks or so.
Ans: There are majorly two types of e-Commerce Apps – A single seller eCommerce App or a multi seller eCommerce App (Amazon can be taken as its epic example).
Now single seller eCommerce App are way more simpler and easier to be created compare to multi seller ecommerce Apps. In Single seller eCommerce App you just have to create one Admin panel or an App for the seller (who is also an admin or app/ brand owner) from where they can update their listings, pricing, pictures, discounts and delivery information while iOS and Android Apps for the end users to be able to search, buy such products with ofcourse additional functionalities. Such App will cost $ 2000 if you are targeting a pretty nice market and can take 15 to 20 Weeks of development.
However, a multi seller custom eCommerce App development will need you to create Apps for your customers, then Apps or web console for your sellers, then super admin for the platform App owner, then you will have to create the mechanism of buy and sell where a commission goes to the platform in every transaction (i.e common eCommerce App monetization strategy), you manage not only users but also sellers and their listings, give report options, refund options and what not. Such an App is bigger than a multi vendor food delivery App and hence cost of development for such an App will go beyond $ 40000 and sometimes even more than that.
There is another type in eCommerce Apps though, where our client already has a web ecommerce app like a magento or shopify or woocommerce app in place. In such a case, we’ll have to take their existing database and APis and integrate with the front end Apps. Cost of development of such an App can be as low as $ 20000.
Ans: IoT (or internet of things) is a phenomenon according to which you create software or Apps that let devices or “things” talk to each other via internet and provide larger ease of life to the user like home automation apps, Audio Video Apps integrated with devices and so on.
In case of IoT Apps or home automation apps, the app developers have to integrate their App with the APis of different devices over the internet (Web services) and each integration becomes a small project on its own. There are many frameworks out there that takes the burden of creating IoT apps from scratch away, but still they are usually complex apps to create. A decent IOT or Home automation App can always cost more than $ 40 K or to the north of it.
Ans: We made a pretty niche-demography targeting Teacher’s oriented Social Media App called Apple Pie on iOS and that cost $ 25000. Having said that, a decent social media App (not like Facebook but a social media App MVP) will involve creating user profiles, user feeds, auto arrangement of user’s feeds based on their preference and algorithm, one o one chat feature, comments, threads, post pictures/ videos, count likes/ comments/ views and much more can start from $ 30000 and can go as much as you can think depending upon how much you want to enhance it for growing users.
Social Apps are driven by data/ content generated by the users so they have to be pretty fast, be able to offer users a seamless experience, should offer daily engaging features and more in order to become relevant in the market and hence for such an app a continuous development effort is needed so an App Entrepreneur should consider this ongoing development cost if their Social Media App takes off good and grows.
Ans: There are various kind of real estate Apps depending upon their data source and user types. So let us discuss cost of various real estate app development by their type –
A real estate App that pulls the listing data from third party APis or aggregators like from MLS (Multiple listing service) and shows listing with all the details to the users and inquiries go to one realtor then such an App can cost $ 15000 to $ 20000. It is lower side because all the data is being pulled from a third party source and all we are doing on the app is displaying the listing nicely, with high quality real estate pictures and all.
A real estate App that may pull listings data from other APis but also allow users and agents to create their own listings, have multiple agents to be able to create their profile and update listings, be able to get inquiries, be able to pay for premium listing and so on can cost more than $ 50000 and take apprx 25 to 30 Work weeks for development. Since there are various user types involved in such a Real Estate App you need to create a very robust and scalable backend and need continuous testing, integration, deployment and enhancements.
Once you add more features like inspector services, adverts, home furnishing services etc then the cost will definitely go more.
Ans: We’ve worked across 3 Telemedicine’s Apps thus far and one of those is very much live and having more than 500 K active users and its called as MediOrbis Telemedicine App and remote medical services here -
A telemedicine App where you have verified doctor’s profiles under various general and specialized categories, having their live or offline appointment schedules, where patients and doctors can have a live video call or chat, with prescription to follow up, and insurance coverage, live billing deduction, keeping patients EMR data HIPAA compliant, distribution of money across doctors and platform and to other user types etc can cost you $ 50000 and take upto 30 Weeks of the development.
Add more user types and functionality and you’ll have to put more engineering efforts and app development costs.
Ans: We made this famous Astro Tele Consulting App named Jyotish for All here , that facilitates real time video, audio calls and chats between expert astrologers and end users and deducts live billing, wallet recharge, let users rate astrology consultants and review them and much more. An App like this would cost $ 45 K or so for both iOS and Android with an Admin panel to control, manage users by the super admin of the app.
Jyotish for all gained 50 K users within 6 months of its launch and works across USA, India and more geographies.
Ans: An App for booking live mechanic booking or Handyman booking is like a multivendor food delivery app where you can book mechanic of required category or a handyman for real time or pre-book them for future time. This app will have multiple service providers (individuals) and also companies. We made an App like this named Helpknob and such an Handyman service booking App can cost you anywhere between $ 35000 to $ 45000.
Ans: Just like a fitness guide app, a meditation/ mindfulness guide app will have several exercise to follow depending upon user’s mental health problems and their goals. For examples, one can select stress and get exercise or curriculum in the form of the video or audio to follow, while someone who selects anxiety will have different categories of the exercise to follow. There will be tracking of the usre’s progress and may be having multiple productive reminders to them to take a break or drink more water or go into a brief breathing thoughtlessness state and so on.
Such an App can cost $ 20000. Our Mindfulness App Studiothink is one such app.
On the other hand, a Mindfulness online coaching app will have live coaches to guide the user through a curriculum not just by the videos or audios but also by live therapy sessions. A single consultant can have their own app and it will cost them around $ 20000 only while a multi consultants-oriented mindfulness coaching app can cost more than $ 35000 (just like multi-doctor telemedicine app).
Ans: An App like tiktok demands a very high quality of App development, design and regularly optimized performance and quality checks. A social App like Tiktok where the main feature is creation and rendering of videos very easily and quickly can be created in $ 50000, however the server costs to handle large number of users and functionality of advertisements and paying to creators based on their views will be an AI oriented job and will cost extra. Also, such kind of apps are to be enhanced regularly for new features, and also to keep process user generated data using Artificial intelligence to throw better and likeable content to the users.
Ans: Like any other service booking app, a taxi booking app can have one vendor provider with multiple taxis in their fleet ready to be booked; or it can be like uber where there are multiple individual taxi drivers associated with the app.
Cost of developing a Taxi booking app for one taxi owner company can cost not more than $ 25 K and we created such an App known as Bravo’s limousine.
Cost of developing a multi driver Taxi Boking App like uber will cost more than $ 50 K if you use a custom code which is recommended for successful operations and scaling of a Taxi Aggregation App’s business
For that matter, any app that aggregates multiple service providers for the users for time an location based booking are complex and effort oriented and tend to cost North of $ 50000.
Ans: We created a Pharma Quiz/ Drug Trivia App known as pharmacy Crack and can be downloaded from here. A quiz app with dynamic question updates, scoring, progress tracking and a cool animation style design will cost around $ 25000 and can take 15 weeks of App development.
A quiz App where you can compete with other contestants in real time will become more like a game app and we’ll need to use a game engine like playfab or Google game services to facilitate real time contest between two or more users. Such An app will cost you more than $ 30000 depending upon various side features.
Ans: An NFT or Crypto trading app will need heavy third party APis and services to pull the data and facilitate transactions and may need legal permissions also in different countries. Such a new Fintech trading App can cost anywhere between $ 30000 to as high as $ 60000 or more depending upon what all services and extra features are being provided to the users.
Ans: Considering an App that you want to create to brand your existing business on mobile apps along with a website is comparatively a simple App development effort and such an App can be made in as low as $ 15000. Such Business/ Brand Apps usually have brand information, product listings, latest news and notifications, updates and dynamic content and have no payment gateways integration etc. For example an App for Samsung, LG or any other brand.
Although these brand Apps are simple, they are very important because consumers these days use apps more than they browse websites and keeping an app for the brands they follow/ use for latest updates, warranty information, store location etc is just a start while these same Brand Apps can help business offer their products and services direct to home eliminating conventional supply chain cycles and get them a competitive edge and definitely more revenue benefits.
Ans: An online Tutor finder and session facilitation App where students and their parents can find a teacher of their choice across any location and book a session with them, pay online, rate the teacher and join repeat classes etc can cost you $ 35000 or more. Such Online Tuition Apps became super famous during pandemic and are still getting strong.
Such Tutor apps usually have features like user profiles, feeds, rating and reviews, session/ appointment booking, wallet recharges, live video calls, free flow whiteboard functionality for the teacher, homework functionality and so on.
Ans: A job finder app where candidates can create their profiles, upload their CVs, intro videos, be able to search for jobs through keywords/ location/ salary type/ experience level and other filters, and where employers can post jobs, schedule interviews, can search for resume database through paid plans and be able to rate candidates and vice versa is as good as like any multiparty content oriented app with various monetization models (candidate boost their candidature in search by paying premium, employers pay for posting jobs or for resume database search and so on) and are pretty complex in nature. Such Job finder/ Job posting/ CV search Apps can cost anywhere between $ 40000 to $ 80000 and use variety of technologies for scheduling, calls, chats, payment transactions, location and more.
Ans: A car rental app can be for a single car rental service provider company or be a platform App where multiple rental car services companies can offer their services like multiple drivers do so on a taxi booking app like uber.
A single vendor Car rental App with tracking and booking functionality along with listing and inventory management can cost $ 25000.
A multiple vendor Car Rental App with all functionality as mentioned in above option + Ability for each vendor to manage their individual providers profile, get booking, get paid, pay transaction fee to the platform etc will cost $ 45000.
Ans: Like any other delivery App, an App for Cannabis delivery can have single vendor for providing the medicine or multiple vendors. However, in case of Cannabis delivery the platform and the providers must have the relevant license from the local govt to be able to do so in the limits of the stipulated geographical locations. We briefly worked on a cannabis delivery App and platform known as Driven which is now a multimillion dollar big company based out at California, USA.
A single vendor cannabis delivery App will cost $ 25000 while a multivendor cannabis delivery app with sperate delivery guy apps, admin panel, pharma app will cost $ 50000.
Ans: A news media app usually gives news in text with picture and blurbs, videos, audience polls, latest news notifications, categorization of news, customer login, upvotes and comments and likes and gamification along with a content publishing panel for the News Editing Team which they use to publish or edit latest news in text, multimedia formats. The further features can be night mode reading, speech to text, follow/ unfollow your favorite writers/ journos, be able to participate in contests, be able to pay premium for premium jobs or to remove ads or for any other premium offerings.
Such rich multimedia oriented high quality news app can cost $ 25000 or more depending upon the side features on top of the essential app features.
Ans: You can create all kind of apps as mentioned above (and more) inside a metaverse using its core Virtual Reality functionality. So like any other kind of App development, metaverse Apps would cost same however they can now cost you $ 10000 or so more than regular prices because it’s a new technology and little more complex and needs more testing before it becomes a regular tech.
Ans: A gig finder app is pretty much same as a job finder/ job posting app principally, but targeted towards on off jobs or small gigs that a provider can perform from remotely (not necessarily but by large you call jobs that you perform from remote as gigs while the same small jobs that you do onsite are called handyman jobs, lol). So like any other job finder app, providers can create their profiles, list their services, get rated, put their price, can pay for premium listing while the customers can book them or post projects on which gig providers can bid (like on upwork) and customers can shortlist and talk and select the ones they want and pay them while platform takes a commission.
Such Gig finder App may cost $ 35000 or more, and can take minimum 20 weeks of development.
Ans: We’ve a dedicated blog on this topic here - https://www.agicent.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-maintain-an-app/ . In simple words, you can hire us on a retainer model to maintain an App month on month. The maintenance packages only start after free warranty time is over (which is generally 3 to 6 months) and cost you as low as $ 2200/ mo (pricing revised in 2022) for 125 hours of maintained per month and can go more cost effective as you book for more hours.
Following are the tasks that are covered (but not limited to) in App maintenance –
Ans: Here are some points that can help you lower down cost of App Development –
Ans: Any App that is useful and can be accepted by the stores (yes, Apple tends to reject Apps that are very simple and offer no significant functionality to the user FYI) takes minimum 6 weeks of design and development and therefore can cost on minimum as $ 10000. However, it is very subjective and sometimes if there is a super simple app where you just have to show some data and images and capture user’s emails then such Apps can be done in lesser than $ 10000. 😊
Ans: We offer our developers as Developers on Demand model also on a regular monthly fee. Price of a developer starts from as low as $ 1800/ mo and goes higher based on their development experience and skill sets. You can try our Offshore Developers Rates calculator here to get a cost estimation on your own (it doesn’t need no email signup unless you want a detailed quote) - https://www.agicent.com/offshore-remote-team-calculator.
Also, on all our service pages you will find monthly rates of our developers mentioned according to their experience level. Needless to say, if you are serious about having an hourly/ monthly fee based development team then you just drop us an email to [email protected] and we’ll take you through the whole process transparently.
Ans: We offer App design services as a part of our overall full cycle app development services. However, if you are just looking for app design then it can cost you between $ 2000 to $ 5000 (depending upon number of design screens, category of design (regular or animation or game design). You can hire a dedicated App designer too from our side starting from as low as $ 1800/ month.
Ans: We don’t charge anything to create App specifications as such and it comes a part of Business Analysis services along with app development service suite. However, if you want only our Business Analysis services to identify and note down granular scope of work for an App, its specification document (Functional requirement document) along with wireframes then we can charge $ 2000 to $ 5000 depending upon the involvement and complexity of the project.
Ans: The simple answer is as much as you can reveal and as much as we can analyze. More the inputs, the better be the understanding of the scope of the work for App development and design and hence more accurate cost of App development. However, we understand many entrepreneurs want to get a cost idea first before revealing all their project details and this is perfectly fine with us. But still, knowing the major goal of the app, user types, and monetization model are 3 important things that we’d like to know before we can give you any good fixed price cost idea. For hourly, you can always use our Offshore Developers Rate Calculator here .
We’ve tried to solve the question of “how much does it cost to develop an App?” using various common app types examples and hope this is helpful. We’ll watch out this space to throw more information time to time and if you have any feedback, feel free to get in touch with us using the contact us form.