Why are mobile apps so expensive?
Mobile apps are for the elite business. Let’s face it, they only really work well if you are either marketing to existing customers or spreading a free product and living off the back of the advertising that comes from them.
And they are incredibly expensive to build. Quotes typically range from £1,500 for a simple App right up to £5,000, still for a very simple App.
But why? Yes, the code is difficult to write, but if I had the flow of work I could easily churn out a few similar basic Apps per week. In fact for some of my targets I expect that I could probably manage just over 1 per day. Is it fair to charge £5,000 for less than a day’s work?
The problem is though the hardware. To include iPhone Apps you must develop on an Apple Mac, not as cheap as a PC. Then to test them you need a few platforms, so an iPhone, an iPod, an iTouch, an Android device etc etc. And what is the monthly running cost of the contracts on that little lot?
And for me to be creating 1 per day needs a team of sales people in the field selling the Apps, collecting payment and being the go between for me and the customer. And all of these sales people need to be able to demonstrate the Apps on their bank of phones.
Suddenly something that should take a day has escalated to 3 man days of effort and a huge amount of hardware – probably 9 handsets at least and their monthly running costs just to keep it all going.
Maybe that is where the costs are!
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