It is a competitive world out there.  I’ve been reviewing the state of app development both nationally and in Knoxville, Tennessee.  There are a lot of great shops out there making apps.  In my review I found some of the following sites listing cost and estimates.

Here’s my review of each:

SPDLoad had a good video and a substantial breakdown.   I think they hit it on the head.  It all comes down to complexity.  I think one other cost worth discussion is the maintenance after the development.   Many shops moved to rails development several years ago.   These have traditionally been server based applications which require more infrastructure and operational costs.  Rails is rather involved and hasn’t in my opinion kept up with the times.        

Couchbase also had a good article.  However it is a year old and I think the costs they estimated for app development is missing inflation.   There was a lot of inflation in 2023 and their article was at the beginning of the year.  Both SPDload and Couch bring up the topic of developer location.   I’ve worked with overseas development.   In my opinion you need a domestic based developer to manage overseas developers.  Often the overseas developers will not understand the nuance of the business idea due to either experience and/or culture.   A domestic based developer is required.  However for most small business ideas this will bloat the costs since two domestic developers can complete a project quicker and in less time than a domestic developer and two or three overseas developers.  The overseas projects have to become really large to justify the extra back and forth time.

However I think they have missed the concept of nearshore developers.  Knoxville, Tennessee is one of the most affordable places to live in and a Southeast Tech Center.  There are other areas in the country but my pick for cost and pro-business taxes is Knoxville and Tennessee.  

Business of Apps, really great in depth article.  Very recent too for 2024.  Once again it’s all about complexity.  The article also does a great job of covering hosting costs, global labor costs.   Great job in covering the complexities of analytics and monitoring of your application.  I’m surprised they didn’t have a discussion of No-Code solutions and tooling.   We use a lot of No-Code at Maedrix Group and it is the great leveler compared to overseas costs.  Compared to the pricing they also listed I don’t think they took into account Nocode solutions.   I avoided No-code stuff about twenty years ago.  But now the frameworks and build outs are so advanced.  Not to mention the combination of AI with them also.

In my next article.  I’ll go into why this should matter to you as you are starting a company and why you need a great local tech partner that has the right tools.