Components of application development costs
The main expenses in the development of software products fall on the salaries of specialists. In order to organize the qualitative development of software it is necessary to have the staff of permanent employees whose loading the project manager is able to control. In other words, these are not random developers on freelance, but employees “at a rate”. As a rule, 4-5 people take part in project development.
Next, the usual multiplication and addition works: we need to know the amount of time spent on development and multiply it by the cost of each employee’s hour. However, the question is how to find out how many hours each employee will spend on the project. It would be great to predict these values more or less accurately and to fix them in the contract. Of course, it is impossible to know the exact time spent by employees in advance. But you don’t want to start a project with a completely unknown budget either, you need to evaluate it at least approximately.
- Project manager / designer;
- Designer;
- Mobile application developers (usually at least two of them);
- Back-end developer;
- Tester.
How to estimate development costs with high accuracy?
Here we will be helped by methods of evaluation, reminiscent of numerical methods of mathematics. Let’s try to split the project into complete parts (stages, iterations, sprints). And these parts into even smaller pieces – into tasks. Each task is a small completed part of the work, which can be evaluated more or less accurately in hours. Usually such a task takes 4-20 hours to complete. It is convenient to do the evaluation separately by the participation of each employee (mobile developer, server programmer, designer, etc.). The time of task execution is multiplied by the cost of an hour of employee and it gives us the total cost of each task in the project. Such an approach allows us to evaluate the task as accurately as possible and to meet both the budget and the deadlines with a minimum error.
Features of evaluation android applications
Fortunately, Google doesn’t spoil developers’ lives very much, that’s why we don’t allocate any features of the platform into separate evaluation blocks. However, under the control of Android there is a huge zoo of various exotic devices with its own customized firmware. Quite often these firmwares do not receive further system updates and freeze forever in some particular version of the android, such as 4.4. The latest version of Android has already number 9 and the developers are mainly guided by it and 1-2 previous versions of Android 9,8,7. In most cases, everything works correctly also on earlier versions: 6 and 5. Versions of Android earlier than 4.4 have already more significant differences. Support for these versions may require a separate version of the application or significant changes in the application.
Which affects the price of iOS applications
Apple has rather strict moderation rules and how to evaluate development costs with high accuracy? For example, a lot of attention is paid to connected payment systems: if you sell electronic goods or subscriptions, you will need to connect the payment mechanism “In App Purchases” (built-in purchases) with a commission of 30% and the moderator will thoroughly test it and can send it for redevelopment several times.
How to reduce the cost of creating an application
It has become unrealistic to find cheap and good programmers for a long time, because a significant part of them left the country and the rest work remotely to the west or work on rather high salaries. In general, the option “somehow do the same thing, but it is much cheaper” disappears.
Other ways to reduce development costs
Start with MVP
The minimal version of the application, which will have only the most necessary functionality. All secondary functions are done later;
Cross-platform technologies
This technique has been successfully used in game development for a long time. Almost all games are written immediately cross-platform. For the development of common applications, the most lively technology at the moment is ReactNative from Facebook;
Plan the programming side of the startup
The point is that it is programming that is the most expensive part of the project. That is, a designer should not tell a programmer what bizarre element he or she should implement. On the contrary: when developing, ready working blocks are used, and the designer designs their location and modifies their appearance. Such variant of working out will allow to avoid superfluous expenses for not critical visual effects.
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