For each of the stages, you will need a certain specialist or two. It means that you will need to form a team consisting of a project manager, a designer, front and back end developers and experienced quality assurance specialist.

Every team member needs to be paid in accordance to their role and competencies.

In IT the industry standard on paying people is measured in hourly rates cost of which varies anywhere from $20 to $200/hour.

But the overhead doesn’t stop at that.

Beside the labor cost, you’re going to have to carry purchase cost on different licenses, APIs and integrations of 3rd party services. A good part of these services are going to be billed on a subscription base rather than a single time purchase. For instance for one of our clients for whom we are building a P-2-P parking exchange platform we integrated mapbox which has a monthly billing cost that goes on top of the development costs. If your app is built for goes with a specific hardware, it will also require certain equipment, cost of which may be unreasonable for single time use.

This is where you might consider outsourcing the entire process to the third party development firm.

The agencies that specialize in building products for clients have all the processes streamlined and can optimize your development. Chances are they’d already done similar projects and know how to save both time and money. On top of that they know their clients’ success and failure stories and can not only develop your app but spare you a failure by pointing out to the right direction in launching and scaling.