How Much Does It Cost To Maintain An App?

‍

Let's say you've built your app's first version and you're off to a solid start. How much does it cost to keep it around? How much does it cost to make changes and iterate on the app's features and design? We're going to try our best to really get in to some of the most valuable cliff-notes on the subject.

‍

Getting Into The App Store

Getting in the Itunes App Store and Playstore is actually not too expensive. You'll need to get a developer account with both Apple Itunes and Google Playstore and then you'll need to upload your app for their team's approval. The Itunes app store cost $100 a year and the Google Playstore cost $25. Which is great! For $125, you can deploy an app into both of the App Store(s) and be in front of hundreds of millions of users in no time.

‍

Server Costs

Server costs are another question. In the early days, however your app stores it's data should be a relatively cheap, even with a robust set-up. But as time goes on and you gain traction that bill will scale with you. Early costs for your servers shouldn't go beyond $20 to $50 a month. If you have very little to no user activity and your bill surpasses this, send us an email. You may have something wrong or something extremely unnecessary in your set-up.

‍

Iterating And Adding New Features

Where it get's a little pricey is in the bigger question, "How much does it cost to change an already existing app's features and designs?". I say this is the priciest feature because unless you're a software engineer/coder, you'll need to hire someone to make these changes. Android and IOS apps, while they look pretty similar, are actually written in two different programming languages. They're completely different devices that essentially run on different forms of software. In recent years, there have been developments in software development tools that make it possible to build and develop both apps at the same time, essentially splitting the time/money costs in half. But unless you've built your project this way from the start, you'll still have to hire two engineers to code and deploy both your Android app and your IOS app separately. I'd say the cost of either an Android or IOS engineer in the US is currently (give or take) around $50-$75 an hour at market rates.Or roughly $10,000 to $12,000 a month (per engineer) if you were to employ them full-time. And let's not forget the additional infrastructure needed to support them in both time and money like any other employee.

‍

Want To Learn More? 

We've spent a lot of time putting together solutions to manage the last barrier to having a more affordable, elegant solution to building and maintaining apps. If you've found this article at all valuable, check out more of our website and pricing available here: LotusTech.NYC

‍

‍