When you decide to hire mobile app developers to build your app, there’s always the issue of cost.
You may want your app to be packed with features and cool design elements, but your budget may not be substantial enough to cover all that. So, what to do?
There are several things you can do to reduce the initial development cost of your app. And if you find the right balance of cost vs. features, the users will still get a good product that will love. Let’s have a look at the three things you can do to spend less on your app without compromising its functionality too much.
- Cut down the features
We know that deciding which features to remove from your app is a painful process. But in many ways it can actually help you create a better app. Why? Because we know from experience that clients often want to pack too many features into an app, which not only increases the development cost but also makes the app bloated. Having to decide which features to keep and the development of which should be postponed is a great eye opener.
The best way to decide which features to remove and which to keep is to write a list of priority features. That list will show you which features are a must-have and which are nice to have, but not essential to make the app fully functional. Those nice-to-have features are the ones that you could safely remove from the release version of your app and consider introducing as updates. Doing that could reduce the initial development cost by up to 50%.
- Simplify the features
If reducing the number of features didn’t help your app fit your budget, you should see how you could simplify the features you decided to keep.
Each feature of your app has a certain depth level – a certain amount of functionality and complexness. While you should keep the core features as functional as possible, you can sometimes reduce the depth of them without losing too much. For example, you could opt for a simple email and password login and introduce social media sign up integration at a later stage. Doing that would lower app development cost.
- Simplify the design
We know that you want your app to look beautiful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend a lot of money on complicated design elements. In fact, simple designs done right perform a lot better because mobile screens are still quite small and people prefer simplicity over fluff.
The actual ability to simplify your design depends on the features your app has. For example, if it uses the phone’s camera, you could use the native interface instead of designing your own. The same applies to other native features that are integrated into your app. You could always spice up the native designs with your own colours because that doesn’t cost too much. Basically, if you can do something without the designers spending a lot of time on it, do that.
We hope that these tips will help you find a compromise between developing a good up and meeting your budget.
