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By Natasha Lomas, 11 February 2010 15:05

FEATURE

In the third part of this silicon.com feature on the business of mobile apps we look at the costs associated with building apps, consider paid apps versus free apps - and throw in some tips on creating a successful app.

The cost of building an app
Costs will be proportional to the scale of your ambition - the more bells and whistles you want your app to have, the more you should be prepared to stump up.

A Forrester report last year set the price of a no-frills app at a minimum of $20,000 - and reckoned a more sophisticated app could set you back up to $150,000. And, according to Forrester analyst Neil Strother, it looks as if costs have, if anything, gone up a bit since then - perhaps owing to the development of more sophisticated apps but also increasing demand for the services of app developers.

"The upper end numbers seem to be getting a little higher," notes Strother. "I think that's partly due to including backend connections to your website or your services and then if you're actually doing commerce that adds more to the cost of building the application - so whenever you get more complexity I think it's going to add to the cost."

However Strother reckons a "fairly simple app" can still be procured for "a reasonable amount of money". But what's 'reasonable' in the app world?

Tim Ocock, VP of business development at B2B app developer Symsource, says the price-tag for a not-entirely-basic app starts at around £15,000: "An app of any quality is going to cost a minimum of £15k to £20k to develop. You can do something less if all it really is is something that launches an existing website or something like that but where all the content is on the application itself and it has some utility, then that's what it's going to cost."

At the top end of the app development scale, costs for the most ambitious app projects can be substantial, as Ocock explains. "The largest and most sophisticated applications in some of the projects we've been involved in - such as flagship newspaper or news service type projects - those are going to cost of the order of £150k, £180k/$200k, $250k to develop because those are apps that are going to have a lot of features," he says.

"They're going to require a very high quality because expectations are going to be very high from users, and they're going to be handling all kinds of different content - video and podcasts and audio streams - they need to have very complex user interfaces, or rather UI that are easy to use but complex to develop. That's been our experience at the high end."

Click on the image above to find out how companies such as Ocado, BA and Oasis have benefitted from building an app in part two of this feature
(Image credit: Ocado)

"The cost of making an app is going to vary a lot depending on what kind of an app it is," says Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester. "If you're making an advanced 3D action game that's going to be a lot more costly - for example - than making an app to support a conference."

Costs will also vary depending on the app platform or platforms you are targeting, and perhaps also on how many territories worldwide you want to target. The basic rule is: the more platforms you want an app on, the more money you will have to fork out in development costs.

"App development can be costly depending on the territory you're in and how many devices and the type of devices you want to go on," says music discovery service Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher. "So in Java, for example, you need to certify every handset that your app is delivered to in a certain country and that could cost you £500 per phone. Whereas in the iPhone you're not paying for certification and you can get out to 50 million devices just through one version of your app."