How Much Does It Cost to Make an App in 2023?

cost to make an app

Calculating the cost to make an app is undoubtedly a perplexing job. To ease your work, here in this guide, we have talked the inside-out of calculating the cost to make an app taking each minute factor into consideration. This comprehensive guide is sure to provide you a complete insight on the details and steps to calculate the cost of making an app.

Building an application across platforms could attract a lot of investment, and bulk investment results in a higher amount of risks. This problem can be brought into control by either selecting a single platform to build an app and then ploughing back profits into building another app for different platforms.

How much does it cost to make an app? 

You have just read the number top-one question in our chart of the most frequently asked questions. So let’s be honest, everything has its price tag. When it comes to creating mobile apps, the time-proven saying ‘you get what you pay for’ is fully justified. The response to this intriguing question is usually ‘It depends’, which raises more questions than answers.

You probably have two questions mind: ‘How much money does it cost to make an app?’ and ‘What does the price depend on?’ and search for the answers on the internet. On the web you may come across a few different websites aimed at estimating mobile app development costs, but they are nothing more than a marketing move to attract your attention with brief questions about your requirements. The estimation you receive will not show you the real picture.

After a number of years on a market, an app development company accumulates extensive experience of mobile app development for multiple platforms, when app projects can be quite complicated, involving AI, ML, IoT, and other advanced mobile tech. Being smart, they learn from mistakes that occur on app projects and so working with such a team would protect you from repeating the same mistakes. App development is a multi-step process that involves careful planning with a proper timeline – again, based on a previous experience.

If you choose the path of creating a mobile app in-house, you can certainly decrease an app development cost, at least initially, because over time, going through a bug fixing caused by lack of experience, you can actually catch up with a price tag you would get from an app development company, should you decide to hire one.

Thousands of companies around the world claim to be the best app developers and guarantee they can deliver the best solution. Well-established or recently founded companies, experienced or ambitious, local or foreign, large or small, high-priced or cheap so many parameters to consider. No wonder that such an enormous selection may confuse not only startupers, but also experienced entrepreneurs.

Online OR Offline Application

The Internet-dependent application attracts a lot cost in an earlier time as compared to no internet-dependent application. Also, in an earlier time, these internet-dependent applications were the ones that require a lot of costs but with backend technologies like Firebase, the app design and development have become affordable.

Number of Features

The beauty of the application is dependent on the features you add in it, and the more features you add, the more investment you have to bring in, instead what you can do is, bring the updates in the version format and slowly increase the ROI

The complexity of Backend

Backend plays an important role in any application as it stores data, manages information and credentials, etc. The front-end sometimes looks simple & easy but the backend becomes complex and that takes out a lot of investment which in turn becomes costly for an app owner.

UI, Animation, Special effects

The application that has great animations, gestures and special effects in it attracts the higher investment and thus, the gaming apps are the costliest one while building.

Who should you hire to make an app?

The hiring isn’t a part of the app cost calculator but if we see the overall cost then this is also considered as an integral part of it. For Ex: If you hire a freelancer from your native, it would cost you more as compared to outsourcing the project. Outsourcing can also become costly if you do not research in-depth but generally hiring a dedicated developer from a company would attract you more benefits and could help you in gaining a few suggestions from their experience.

Cost to make an app According To Its Types

These apps are those large and heavy apps that aim at providing the best user experience, optimization, and fast work. They use various device’s APIs and also process a wide range of features at the same time.

cost to make an apps start getting expensive based on the platforms you want to support because it involves more people in the app creation process of an app. They are usually business apps, education apps, and entertainment apps.

Hybrid Apps

The development and maintenance cost goes down for this app if the creating process involves a team and a single code, which works for all the platforms.

But cross-platform apps are less optimized; they lack access to APIs and cannot provide a user experience similar to the one provided by native apps.

They are only appropriate for small and medium communication apps, such as lifestyle app or game app.

Database Driven Apps

These are the apps that are complex with the bulk data to operate, stored directly in the device memory or on a web server.

For this app to work as desired, additional features like a camera, internet connection or access to a phone gallery may be required.

The native apps that use device memory to store data libraries are various mobile dictionaries or encyclopedias.

Basic Functionality App

These apps are very fast to create and include very few or no features at all. They are built for personal use, and these kinds of apps cannot get found in the app store.

Usually, they are made to view the list of the topic- where you can click on a question and get the information about it or view another list.

Firmware/Hardware Dependent Apps

These apps access a mobile device and aim at enhancing the functionalities. The functionalities include an alarm, flashlights, camera, etc.

For example, AlarmMon is an app that allows the user to customize the alarm clock.

Mobile/Gaming Apps

Sometimes the question is, How Much Does It Cost to Make a Game App? For that purpose, you need to take its features into account.

Games can be simple and advanced, including various features like 3D graphics and physics, global ratings, AR support, social media integration.

So basically, creating a more sophisticated gaming app can be expensive. Gaming apps are the most popular apps worldwide, and of course, the ones that bring in more profit