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How Much Do Software Development Services Cost?
Looking for a reliable software developer who can provide the best rates for an app development project?
00:16 26 September 2021
But what are the best rates possible? How do you put a price on software development?
Businesses of all sizes and niches, at some point or other, are forced to embrace the digital revolution and launch modern software for their customers or to improve their internal business and management operations. At such times, the question of how much money they are willing to spend is the first one to come up.
We will tell you all there is to know about custom software development pricing.
If you want to learn more about this subject, visit here: https://www.goodcore.co.uk/company/pricing/
There is no fixed, straightforward answer to the question: “How much will my software cost to build?” There are several factors that contribute to the varying software development costs. Let’s take a look at some of the top factors that determine how heavy your business app development project is going to be on the pocket.
1. Type of software you want to build
There are many types of software that one can build as part of the adaption of the latest digital technologies. Depending on the purpose that you intend to use your software product for, your software product can take the shape of a website or web portal, a mobile application (for iOS, Android, or both, or for some other mobile OS platform), or even a desktop-based app. There are different considerations for different types of apps because varying amounts of work and effort go into each type. The software development prices could go even higher if you decide to choose to build the same app for multiple platforms.
2. Complexity of your app logic
Every app is different in its own way. There are many unique types of software, and the complexity level of each type is different from that of others. The cost increases as the complexity level rises. For example, if you want to build a simple calculator app, it might not cost you as much as a complicated, specialised financial calculator app would cost. That is because the logic behind a simple calculator is not as complicated as that of a financial calculator. The latter may involve the implementation of technically complex formulae or algorithms. The scope for both projects would be quite different.
Thus, the scope and complexity of your app is a major factor in determining software development pricing.
3. User interface design elements
What are the various types of users that you want your new software to be targeted at? Is the target audience tech-savvy or not? These are a couple of very crucial questions for a software product owner to answer. Each software product’s user interface and user experience design has to be specially formulated to make sure that the elements that are included in the design are comfortable for the end-users to handle. Often, the more user-friendly an app needs to be, the more design-intensive it gets.
The complexity of the app’s logic might also influence its design complexity. For example, if there are some audio/visual intensive features you want the app to offer to its users, you may have to include some complex design features to efficiently and effectively accommodate audio and video elements.
The more time and effort you have to spend on the UI and/or UX design for an app, the higher the software development costs will go.
4. Location of your software development services provider
Over the years – especially since the whole trend for outsourcing and offshoring services set off in the business world, – we have witnessed a lot of serious debate around the question of custom software development pricing being affected by vendor location. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that your vendor’s location does not affect the prices that they offer you, it is simply not true.
There are several factors that can cause the location of a vendor to affect them and force them to offer higher or lower prices to their customers and clients. One of them is the level of development and technological progress that a particular geographical region has achieved. The general level of literacy and education is another key factor. The current state of the region’s economy can also affect prices. All these factors can end up contributing to the skill levels of the service providers. A higher level of technological progress, education, and knowledge lead to the employees becoming more skilled, knowledgeable experts. Good work must be rewarded well. Thus, software development prices can go way up.
To show you a very basic contrast of pricing varying by location, let’s pit a first-world European country against a developing Asian country, as an example: the UK vs India. App development cost in the UK would be much higher than that in India because the UK has an advantage over India in all the aspects that we discussed above. Thus, you might prefer getting your software built by an Indian service provider.
However, one must not forget that the price is not the only factor you should be considering in this moment of critical decision-making. While the extremely low costs may seem like a dream come true, they come with their own disadvantages. In trying to get the lowest possible prices, you can easily end up having to settle for lower skill levels and, thus, lower quality of services rendered. Then there is the issue of the time difference. If your vendor is located in a different region from yours, you might struggle with real-time communication and time overlap. Differing primary languages of conversation might also present a barrier to effective communication.
This will all reflect badly on your precious work. Thus, it is important to know what the perfect balance of both cost and quality needs to be.
Conclusion
We have thus far talked about the top 4 factors that affect software development pricing:
- Type of software
- App logic complexity
- Software UI/UX design
- Vendor location
There can be many other factors that could make your development prices go up or down. In order to bring development costs to fall within your budget, you need to prioritise certain aspects of development and compromise in a few areas so you can achieve the best of both, cost and quality.