How To Reduce App Development Cost Wisely? (Steps To Consider)

XongoLab Technologies
7 min readNov 19, 2021

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app development cost

Developing a mobile app is trending nowadays as they help in targeting a mass audience at the same time. It helps businesses in giving a tough competition in the market. It’s an additional facility that can help you in earning high revenues.

Whenever people think to have the app, the first thing that came to their mind is the budget. Whenever we consider developing an app it gets difficult to estimate the app development cost and how to keep it lower.

There are two ways to get your app ready, one is to hire freelancers and pay them on an hourly basis, and the second is to hire a mobile app development company. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.

By availing of mobile app development services from a reputed company, you get a chance to work with skillful developers who gives you the best advice regarding the app development process. They offer multiple solutions to meet the app goals and fulfill your all customized requirements.

Big organizations hire a full team of developers because they have enough finances to do so and small businesses basically depend on outsourcing to get the mobile app.

Budget plays a crucial role in an app development process. It is not a cup of tea for everyone. You have to take care of many crucial aspects that impact your budget. Everyone wants to have a feature-rich high performing application at less price. But, it is not possible to get everything at a minimum budget. You have to compromise somewhere, but later on, when you get sufficient funds, you can add more advanced features to your app to make it look good and different from others.

If you want to convert your million-dollar app idea into reality but unfortunately have a small budget, you don’t have to worry about that. Read this complete post, and you will get several ideas through which you can save your cost.

Steps To Consider For Reducing App Development Cost

There are several ways through which you can get your app ready within your budget. Certain things are there that have to be taken care of at the time of planning the app structure and features that you want in it. Let’s discuss some important points that can help you in reducing your app development cost.

⚫ Planning

Appropriate planning leads to future success. It applies to both large and small organizations. The purpose behind this approach is to set up the cost structure and avoid unnecessary expenses wherever possible.

Create the product requirement first and prepare a highly structured PRD and tech stacks that you want to use. Here are some key components of PRD.

  • Project objective
  • Product ideas
  • App features
  • Platforms to launch the app
  • Tech stack
  • Timelines
  • UX/UI designs
  • Quality criteria
  • Estimated Budget

Apart from all these factors, make sure to deeply research the market demand and supply. Find market niches, opportunities, target audience, and your competitors. Gather each small information about your competitors. It’s better to create an official document and present it to your in-house team through emails, messages, meetings, presentations, etc. You can choose any of the options whichever you prefer. Discuss each phase of mobile app development before coming to any conclusion. Planning helps in understanding the business ideas and reduces the chances of risks and unnecessary wastages.

⚫ Choice of the platform

Once your planning stage gets overs, choose the app platform wisely where you want it to be launched. It matters a lot because it plays a vital role in setting up the overall budget. Android and iOS are the top ones, so you can choose either of them to save cost or you can also choose both of them if you don’t want to compromise with the large audience aspect. Each platform has its complexities.

iOS apps are comparatively cost-effective because they are only limited to specific people, and here the target audience also decreases. Secondly, iOS apps are developed by organizations that specifically want to target the rich generation who financially sounds good. iOS platform will help you to earn a good amount of revenue.

If we talk about the Android market, then it has the biggest market share, and the number of Android users is much larger than iOS ones. You can bigger audience with the Android platform as compared to the iOS. You cannot afford to miss the opportunity of running the app on Android.

Worldwide iOS has approximately 1 billion users, and Android has more than 2.8 billion users. It would be more beneficial if you target both of them.

source: statista

⚫ Outsource of In-House

Deciding the mobile app development staffing is a difficult task. It is a very critical stage of your planning where you have to decide whether you want your app to be developed in-house or you want to outsource it. Your final decision impacts the overall budget cost, workflow structure, and maintenance needs as well.

According to Deloitte, more than 31% of people outsource app development Globally. It is quite challenging to manage a balance between in-house and outsource task execution, but it has to be taken care of anyhow.

There are many advantages of outsourcing that you can avail yourself of, and which saves your overall cost and time. Below mentioned are a few benefits of outsourcing-

  • You can hire dedicated developers with advanced expertise who keep years of experience in developing apps.
  • It cut down the extra costs like office rental, equipment cost, maintenance costs. It also minimizes the internal workflow at a huge scale.
  • You will receive a ready-to-use product at the end according to your PRD list.
  • By hiring a leading mobile app development company you get the assistance of experienced people who will give their best to facilitate top-notch results.

⚫ Custom app features and MVP

Having an idea doesn’t get you success, so don’t get overconfident after discussing ideas. Once everything gets planned, create MVPs. It helps in clearing out major questions like:

— How you will target your audience?

— How will you realize that your idea will work?

— Are you missing something or not?

— What if your app fails?

— What if people don’t use your app?

It is important to clear all the doubts before converting any idea into reality. It will save you money. You will get a rough idea of whether your app will work or not. Here are some features which can save your overall cost if you avoid them at the time of development.

  • You can avoid integrating custom functional services like the integration of camera and push notification as it consumes your budget.
  • If you aim to cut your development cost, then prefer not to integrate motion graphics and 3D effects.
  • Unusual buttons, forms, and other elements that are used in designing UI.
  • Avoid complex designing and keep it simple as much as you can.
  • You can adopt a [pay as you go model or monthly subscription model to deal with your finances.

⚫ Use credible technologies

Tech stack used in the app makes a big difference in the overall app development cost. Using credible technology means wisely choosing the programming languages, frameworks, and digital tools that developers use to build apps. It helps in determining the workflow, the style of the app, and the complexity involves in it. A proven tech stack can help you in reducing the overall cost and save team resources.

You can decrease your overall cost if you use these popular stacks-

  • Lamp
  • Python-Django
  • MEAN
  • MERN
  • .Net
  • Ruby on rails

These stacks are highly flexible and easy to use. Their regular update system keeps the app’s performance up to date. If you choose any of these popular stacks you can get various benefits, and there are thousands of experienced developers are available in the market. You can call them for development, testing, and to resolve maintenance difficulties if any arise.

Choosing the right technology stack saves your time and effort, and it also plays a major role in saving your expenses.

If you own a small business and wanted to expand it more, we suggest you, think about having mobile app development services. But, if you belong to a large organization, you can hire a separate team of skilled developers who will provide you with the expected results. If you want confidentiality then, hiring freelancers would be the best approach because, with app development companies, you can face confidentiality issues.

To sum up

The best way to control app development costs without affecting the quality is to use mobile app codes rather than to choose custom architecture. Hire a Mobile app development company as they keep a pool of skilled developers and managers that will command your project. Each app development process gets easy and smooth if you avail mobile app development services to get the app. So think twice and take your time before coming to any decision.

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XongoLab Technologies

Trusted web & mobile app development company serving clients across the globe since 2011. Working with AI, DevOps, ML & IoT. https://www.xongolab.com/