How much are mobile business apps going to cost you? Here’s a compendium of analyses, surveys and calculators to help set reasonable expectations for what building a custom mobile business app will cost.
Summary (TL;DR)
Surveys suggest that the price range for developing an enterprise mobile app is most often from $100,000 to $500,000:
A VDC survey of enterprise app developers found mobile apps to cost an average of $140,000 each.
A Clutch survey of app development companies indicated a median price of $171,450 per app.
A Kinvey survey of CIOs found the average price to be $270,000 per app.
Cost calculators provided by various companies show a feature-rich app might cost from $267,000 to $360,000.
An EMM survey showed over 75% of enterprises budgeting over $250,000 for mobility solutions, with over 25% budgeting over $1.5 million.
Mobile App Development Cost Calculators
Several mobile app and platform companies are now offering calculators that let you specify the features you need and see a ballpark estimate of how much your app will cost. We ran a hypothetical app project through each calculator, answering the questions to represent the kinds of features and complexity we see in our own customers’ high-end mobile solution requirements.
Our example project from SISGAIN is a cross-platform app development for iOS and Android, and includes login authentication, complex business logic and UI, offline functionality, and backend connections. Keeping the estimates parallel was an inexact science because they each ask different questions, but we made the effort & final cost was $237,000 around. Because there’s so many different variables, the price for a mobile app could range anywhere from $5,000 to $500,000; however, the price range will typically be somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000, with the entire process taking 12-20 weeks to develop an app.