The Real Cost to Build Your First iOS App
There are so many authoritative blog posts on the subject of average costs for developing a v1.0 MVP (Minimum Viable Product) iOS app. You’ll have to dig through several paragraphs of conditional disclaimers and startup cost comparisons, but eventually they’ll all pretty much tell you the same thing: prepare for it to cost from $90,000-$150,000 to hire a qualified team to make your first MVP iOS app.
Okay, now you know. First, drink some water; now, let’s walk through some alternatives to that six-figure, 100-pound Gorilla.
Scale Down App Features
Can you start with a simpler version of your app? E-commerce, API integration and server components all add substantially to development costs. Can you do without these things in your v1.0? If so, you might be able to bring that MVP development cost down as low as $25,000.
It’s Not ‘MVP or Nothing’
You can also think of this as getting out of your own way. Do you really need v1.0 to be an MVP? Can you do, say, a v.05 to present to investors and raise the rest of the capital to build out v.1.0? You won’t have full-stack functionality, but you can have something built that looks good and conveys your idea, and you can get a taste of what it’s like to work with a development team without jumping all the way into the deep end. If your app idea is strong enough, you can take v.05 and sell it to investors, then come back and finish building it with the team when you’ve secured your VC funding. The hustle is the same, just re-arranged.
Don’t Make Mistakes That Cost You Money
The worst thing you can do when you have a very limited development budget is to make all your decisions based on that sense of ‘limitation’. Understand the present and future value of choosing a quality tech team to build your app. We all know someone who hired the cheapest senior-level developer they could find to build a $50k app for $10k, and then lived to regret it, either scrapping the idea altogether or paying more than $50,000 to start over with someone else who knew what they were doing. Starting small or in stages is not a bad way to start, if your funding is limited but you have a great idea.
So you don’t yet have six figures to build your iOS app, but you do have the stomach of an entrepreneur and a unicorn of an idea. Think it all the way through, drink some more water, and go get started.
