You want to build a mobile app for your brand within a short span of time. Or, you just need to build another niche app for a specific target audience after your earlier apps failed to receive enough traction.
Now, whether as a startup mobile app development company or as a venture with a continuing pipeline of mobile app projects, you need to cut your budget to size.
After all, it is the ability to build a feature-rich app in a small budget that can give your app business a competitive lead from the start.
There are many ways to keep the development budget low including picking a startup development company offering a very competitive quote and compromising the user experience by dropping some features from the list.
Well, these are already outdated solutions to bring down the budget. Instead, there are solutions that won’t force you to compromise on developer expertise, features and user experience.
Let us explain below some of the most effective ways to optimise the app development budget without compromising on anything.
1. Have Clear Goals and Objectives
The first thing that you need to focus upon is setting up your goal. You need to have a clear idea about what you are going to accomplish with the product. Let us offer some key questions that you need to ask when starting with a development project.
- What mobile users can achieve or accomplish through your app?
- What are the key features and functionalities to fulfil what users want to achieve?
- Which features and design elements are key to good user experience for the app?
- Which are mandatory features and which are just nice ones for enhancing the user experience?
While you should not compromise on the key features and design elements that play the most crucial role for superb user experience and audience retention, at the same time you need to remain prepared to renounce a few features that are not absolutely necessary for the intended user experience.
2. Choose the Appropriate Technology Stack
Choosing the right technology stack can significantly impact the app development budget. You first need to consider the right technology stack for the intended app features and functionalities.
Now, you only need to go for less complicated and more modular technologies that help faster development without compromising on quality parameters.
Moreover, you need to give priority to open-source and free tools rather than the premium ones.
Lastly, you should choose technologies supported by a large community of developers and that is commonly pursued by many developers as a must-have skill.
After having a brief list of the technologies and tools you require for building an app, you should make a detailed comparison of various available options for building the same feature.
Based on features and the challenges involved in shaping an app to the perfect shape, you need to pick technology stack that ranges from free to the paid ones, from highly sought-after, simple and effective skills to complicated and less known ones.
3. Always Focus on the RFP Details First
RFP or Request for Proposal serves a great role in the development projects of websites and mobile apps across the niches. This proposal is addressed to the developers who are responsible to build the app from scratch.
The requested proposal basically serves as the key and elementary document showcasing all the key requirements of the project. Let us have a look at some of the key requirements that any RFP covers:
- The value proposition of the app.
- The milestones and deadlines of the development project.
- Specific business needs the app is going to serve.
- The budget of the entire development right from the conception and prototyping to the deployment.
When you give utmost priority and focus on these RFP requirements, you can take measures to meet them properly.
4. Select the Best Development Platform
Now, that you have a clear idea about the project requirements and features of the intended app, it is time to decide on the OS platforms you are going to launch your app for.
Let’s understand that building native apps separately for iOS and Android platform will always be an expensive affair for initial development and also for future updates.
While Android dominates the market share with 87% of smartphones belonging to Android OS, iOS on the other hand, dominates the market of high-spending customers.
While the Android Play Store makes it easier for any app to launch an app, iOS with stricter quality control actually makes it a status quo for the approved App Store apps.
While the first allows you to reach the wider smartphone user audience, the later helps your app to gain increased earning potential and reputation. As far as app marketing is concerned, both platforms offer equal opportunities.
But these days, instead of building native apps for iOS and Android it is popular among most developers to opt for hybrid development.
Hybrid apps work basically as mobile websites with an app like interface and native user experience. The principal benefit of the hybrid approach is that you can build a single app and run it on different platforms.
The reusability of the same code for two different app versions on iOS and Android platforms makes this a cheaper alternative compared to native development.
5. DevOps
A faster development process is a key aspect to reduce the cost of development. To economise the available resources through collaboration, DevOps has come as a great platform.
Now several IT companies have come synchronising and running their solutions in parallel. Different processes within IT companies now can collaboratively work together on the DevOps platform.
This breaking the walls of separation through continuous collaboration and grabbing inputs and help from multiple development companies have been materialised by DevOps.
Through DevOps, a company can take advantage of an array of rapid development tools that support drag-and-drop development process to cut short the development time. For a development company, such faster and collaborative development approach of DevOps brings a lot of savings.
6. MVP or Minimum Viable Product
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is embraced by many startups as the most effective and efficient development approach to reduce the cost while taking advantage of gradual value addition over a period of time.
MVP is basically about building a very basic stripped-off version of the app with just the crucial and mandatory features while keeping the core design infrastructure and user interface intact. This allows for faster development at a lesser cost.
Moreover, this approach allows developers to validate the product and based upon feedback and iterations come with additional features and changes through future updates.
MVP always help you to start with the app early while keeping things open as far as bringing changes and value additions is concerned.
Conclusion
Finally, you also need to choose the right development partner who can meet your cost expectations without really compromising on quality and user experience.
Most companies go for outsourcing the development job simply because of the availability of the skill-set, expertise and relevant project experience.
