How much should app iphone or ipad development cost?

Question

I'm an iOS developer (freelancer) and i want to know how much cost to build an app? and how should i do to estimate the price? like this app http://www.finalcad.fr/en/index.html

Answer 1

Typical contractor rates are in the $75-$150 range. Other than that, it really depends on your app. Here are some common considerations:

• How many different views/pages does your app have? Is it 4 or 5 pages that have no real interaction, or a complicated tree of resources that is ever changing? Are these pages static, or generated on the fly?
• What level of interaction do those pages have? Is it a wall of text with 2 buttons? Does it have a scroll view that pre-loads images ala Google Maps? Does it use pre-existing functionality in iOS, or are you rendering custom OpenGL ES stuff?
• Will you be interacting with web services? Are you just reading RSS feeds, or posting/retrieving? Syncing issues can add a lot of cost to a project just because cell coverage is intermittent by nature.
• Will you be using custom or default graphics? If custom, how does the developer get them? Will they be pre-sliced, or a raw PSD? Did the designer customize stuff that isn't easily changed, and will this cause custom objects to need to be created?
• What's your timeline? Is this a rush job that needs to be done by the weekend, or can this be done gradually over the next 3 months.
• What dependencies does this project have? Will I be including images/pdf's/video that is coming from a third party? Will it be provided at the beginning of a project, or sent intermittently during? Believe it or not, this can greatly change how an app is built.

If you can nail down some of those questions, it will give us a better idea of how to answer your question. For orders of magnitude, think of it this way: App development is a game of tens of thousands, not hundreds. Very basic apps will cost north of $1000 easily, and something as complicated as the app you link to can cost >$75,000 very easily (check out this link for the example of what it cost to develop Twitterific)