Building your own software is costly. Whether you assemble a team to build it or have someone else build it for you, it’s an undertaking that requires significant investment in time and resources. A lot of people assume that building your own software is like buying off-the-shelf solution. You spend the money, you get to use the software—it’s just supposed to work. That couldn’t be further from reality. Let’s unpack what really goes on with the true cost of building your software.
There are two main components of the software cost: development cost and maintenance cost. Let’s talk about development cost for now and the things that affect it.
Scope
This is easily the most overlooked aspect when building software. Development cost is a variable cost. It is proportional to the scope—normally expressed in features—you want to build. The rule is simple: the more feature you want to bake in, the more hours it needs to be built therefore the more expensive it is. However, understanding the process is important. The more you know and understand what you want, the better you can define your scope. Identifying, prioritizing, and even skipping features can lead to better use of expensive development hours.
Let’s say you want to build an e-Commerce app with built-in payment. In an untrained eye, the payment is one feature. In reality, the hours to build the feature is equal to the number of payment providers you want to support (PayPal, Stripe, etc). The same concept can be applied to any external integration you wish to include like authentication providers (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc).
Distribution
How do you plan to deliver your service or products to your customer? Through a web app? A mobile app? Via Facebook? All of the above? Each distribution channel you include incurs additional cost. Furthermore, for mobile apps, keep in mind that they are developed separately for each platform. Right now, there are only two platforms that matter: iOS and Android. Your target demographics should dictate which platform to pick.
Developing for social media platform such as Facebook is attractive because of the instant access to millions of users. Basically, your app will run inside their platform and integrate with your backend system. However, these kind of web apps are sandboxed with stringent constraints. Tighter constraints typically means longer development timelines.
The most practical choice is web because of its ubiquity. Users can access web apps using their phones, laptops, and tablets. Additionally, web technology has become so powerful that it can offer most capability that other mediums can do.
Native apps, however, has the advantage when it comes to accessing raw compute power of a device. If your application will require performance-intensive computing like games, native app is the ideal candidate.
Technology Stack
While picking which technology stack to build your app with can affect your development cost trivially, it’s worth considering nonetheless specially if you are building your own team. Mature technologies have better tooling that speed up development tasks. They also have better community support around them thus building and troubleshooting are easier. The most frightening situation you can end up with is going with a new technology and running into a platform-level issue. This can completely derail your app.
Technology stack can also affect how you build a capable development team. Mature technologies like Java, .NET, PHP, etc. might not sound cool and sexy but developers with varying expertise and experiences are abundant. This will give you flexibility on how you can assemble your team based on your budget.