Why is building apps so expensive?
And it’s not just apps. It’s professional websites, online stores, or really any type of digital product or software. The short answer is: time is money. Like building a structure, software requires teams of specialists performing very time-intensive tasks. Since software does not require any physical material, many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the cost of piecing together bits and bytes when there are no atoms nor molecules involved. To better explain, let’s run with this building analogy.
Bike Sheds
The cost to build any structure depends on the size and complexity of the overall project. A bike shed can be easily assembled by a single person in a few days at the most. Even a really fancy bike shed does not require much planning and if you would rather not build it yourself, finding a handyman on Craigslist could fulfill the need. Like most mid-sized construction companies, we do not build bike shed-sized products. Because every build is still a project, it requires an account manger to communicate the scope, a project manager to make sure it all gets done to spec, at least one person with the talent to do the implementation, and accounting staff to handle getting paid. Anyone looking for an $800 website is better off going to Upwork than they are a product agency.
Residential Buildings
This is how we think of the average business and marketing website. These and other types of software require a bit of planning and follow a similar series of steps from there:
Discovery
Where is the build site? How many square feet and floors will it be? Shall it go on a concrete slab or up on stilts? How many bedrooms and bathrooms will it have? Is there a preference for building materials? These are just a few of the opening questions an architect might ask when gathering requirements for a new design. Instead of square feet and rooms, a software product manger would query about the number of screen views, how they will be organized, if there are any special requirements such as user logins, and the type and breadth of content which will eventually live in the product. In the world of bricks and boards, there is also the legal consideration of being up to code based on the location and intended use of the structure. The parallel in software revolves around privacy policies, terms of service, disclaimers, ADA, CCPA, COPPA, GDPR, HIPAA, and a dozen other acronyms.
Blueprints
Even if you haven’t seen architectural plans in person, you have likely spotted them in a show or movie. They’re the two-dimensional prints that the jewel thieves analyze before George Clooney leads them through a secret tunnel for the big heist. In software, we call these plans interaction design, or UX for short. Like blueprints, they are usually monochromatic line drawings that lay out where things go.
Instead of windows, walls, and doors, UX blocks out each screen view’s element location including media assets, copy sections, and buttons. One of the best things about UX is that it is easy to adjust. Because everything is a placeholder in this phase, moving it around and iterating could take minutes as opposed to the hours or days that might get sucked up when adjusting high-fidelity art files. At the end of the interaction design phase, you should have an end-to-end plan of your product which includes every screen view and state. It may even be imported into an interactive prototype tool to show others how it works in context, providing a feel for how the screens and actions relate to each other as you click or tap through them on your desktop or phone.
Construction
This is where the building analogy gets a bit funky. Obviously you’d paint a house and fill it with furniture after the walls and roof go on, not before. In software, the polish is applied before the construction begins, but we’ll get to the design afterwards for the sake of this building-led comparison. In the world of construction, there are many teams that go to work including those with the expertise of handling, concrete, framing, plumbing, electrical, sheetrock, and roofing.
Building a digital product has a similar ecosystem of professionals who also often work in stages or in unison. These might be platform specialist such as those who know the ins and outs of Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal, or Webflow. Then there’s more of the under-the-hood type of pros who specialize in presentation layer code (HTML, JS, CSS, etc) or backend work (PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.) Depending on who you ask, there are between 700 and 9,000 programming languages and most practitioners are rarely proficient at more than one.
Painting and Landscaping
Okay, time to jump back to that section right after Blueprints but before Construction. The place where it didn’t makes sense to put on the polish before building the complete physical structure But in software creation, this beautification happens right after interaction design is complete. Another specialist called a User Interface (or UI for short) Designer joins the party to bring all those monochromatic line drawings to life. The art files they create are called pixel-perfect renderings because they represent the exact marching orders that dictate the look and feel of the product when the engineering team implements those designs into code. The previous UX phase intentionally left out color and content because it’s not only more difficult to make quick adjustments to, but it distracts from the interaction patterns and user flows that are at the heart of that phase. Now it’s time to distract away. The addition of logos, color palettes, copy, and media assets becomes the new focus during this phase.
Custom vs Prefab
Prefabricated homes are all the design rage. A beautiful prefab modern home that would make Frank Lloyd Wright grin could be yours at a massive discount when compared to that of a custom designed one. What makes it so much less? Production scale, a lot less planning, and fewer specialists to pull it all together. You may end up with the exact home layout as hundreds of other people, but there’s always the opportunity for customizations here and there to make it your own. In the world of software design, we call these prefabs “themes.” Many themes are free or are rarely more than a few hundred bucks because like the prefab homes, they are built at scale as opposed to one at a time.
What you get is a near fully-functioning website with all sorts of demo content inside of it to give you a real feel for how it will look and act on the web. After we turn a designer and engineer loose on it, the demo content is replaced with your own and many themes will support some pretty involved customizations. These modifications could be as minimal as your logo, color palette, and font library or as major as building entirely new custom features into the product. If you are okay with starting with an existing design, themes can save a lot of time and money since discovery ends up a bit lighter, and the UX and UI phase could range from nonexistent to about 50% less work.
Condos
Some people desire home ownership but hate the thought of maintaining the greater structure such as leaky roof, electrical issues, plumbing trouble, and landscaping upkeep. For these folks, a condo is great option. There is the addition cost of HOA fees, but for many its well worth the tradeoff of not having to deal with these other systems. When building any web app or even a simple WordPress site, a hosting company such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) must be selected with the considerations of speed, concurrent users, and the supporting technologies around database scripts. Platforms such as Shopify, WiX, and Squarespace have taken the approach of themes a step further and combined them with embedded design tools and the inclusion of hosting services under one subscription fee. These are called Hosted Solutions. You can even buy your domain name through Squarespace and connect it to your site in a couple of clicks vs the management of DNS records on a third-party registrar.
Retail Buildings
When designing and building something to be used in the world of retail, there are many more considerations to be made when compared to residential. For starters, there’s usability. The store has to be located in a place that is easily accessible, and once there, the shopping and purchasing experiences must be intuitive for the customer and profitable for the retailer. Have you ever walked through the Ikea labyrinth? It’s a twisty traverse that is maddening when running in to grab that on deck lamp which you know is hiding roughly half a mile from the entrance. But this was all laid out by design, and if you aren’t in a rush, the pilgrimage from entrance to exit will take you from thoughtfully staged living rooms down the escalator to office accessories, bathrooms, and houseplants. By the time you make the pitstop for Swedish meatballs (strategically placed within this maze another half a mile from the registers), your cart is guaranteed to be overflowing with solutions for modern living that you didn’t even know you needed.
There are many other bits and pieces you wouldn’t find in a residential dwelling including cash registers, freight areas, and additional codes to comply with. E-commerce sites have similar considerations by means of purchase-eliciting user experiences, payment gateways, fulfillment systems, customer accounts, abandoned cart automations, recurring payment systems, and discount code management. The good news is that platforms like Shopify have made it easier than ever to leapfrog over a lot of this minutia and start selling online almost immediately. Just like a retail building, e-commerce sites come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve built the equivalent of a mall kiosk that sells only one gadget, all the way up to the department store equal of web-stores that offers tens of thousands of products.
RVs
Wanderlust is real. For some people, life on the road is where it’s at and they’ll gladly consolidate all of their possessions to fit into a big box on a set of wheels. Sure, they could just take a road trip instead, but it’s not the same experience. A decision like this is usually well thought out, as should be the plan to build a native mobile application. “Native” means coded in a specific programming language to work on the iOS or Android operating systems, and it will likely be downloaded from the those respective app stores. The rationale to go this route should be based on the business requirements and subsequent features that will only work on mobile. Examples of these include push notifications, location services, access to the camera, and use of the device’s accelerometer. Another reason might be the need for complete control of the experience without the constraints of a mobile browser. Just as there is a massive price range for the type of RV one would live in, the same exists for mobile apps.
The difference is that there are plenty of RVs that cost far less than a single family home which just isn’t the case with the price of a native mobile app compared to the average web app or site. All of those same preliminary discovery and design steps are still necessary, and there aren’t nearly as many viable options for Themes or Hosted Solutions. Additional costs are also to be expected around the complexities inherent to building for mobile, combined with the fact that mobile developers command a premium price based on the current market demand for them. We’ve likely talked more people out of mobile apps than we’ve actually built, simply because after a bit of discovery, it was clear that the client didn’t really need one.
A Change of Plans
Contractors for the rich and finicky deal with this all the time. The day after the gorgeous marble floors are installed, the owners announce, “I really like the island my friend just put in his kitchen. Let’s do that. Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right?” No big deal except for tearing up that section of the new floor, running electrical conduit to that part of the room, adding plumbing because of course they want a sink on that island, and whoops — adding those utilities requires tearing out the ceiling below for access. Yup, no big deal. In the world of software, this is called a Change Order.
A Change Order might be anything that wasn’t in the original scope (Oh, didn’t we mention that we wanted a page in here that manages our podcast?), or going back to a completed phase of the project after a subsequent phase has begun. An example of this might be that after completion of discovery, interaction design, visual design, and well into engineering, a decision is made to change some page layouts and navigation structure. At this point, like in the case of adding the kitchen island, the other specialists have to come back in and adjust the UX, amend the art files, and give the new versions to engineering for implementation. It’s all part of the development process and is almost expected to happen at some level with every project, but it does involve a real cost.
So why is it so f*cking expensive?
To repeat the opening revelation, time is money and this stuff takes a lot of time from some very highly skilled professionals. I had always dreamt of building my own home somewhere in the woods. Perhaps just a tiny house, as long as I could construct it with my own hands. That’s until I watched a docuseries on Netflix which tracked the stories of everyday folks building their own tiny homes. Nope. Even the simplest structures looked crushingly stressful for the untrained person to complete. But unlike the glory of finally living in your self-constructed tiny house dream, all the work that goes into digital products only ever leads to a pretty little display of lights on your desk or phone. You can’t cradle the code in your hands, drive it down the road, or host a dinner inside of it. It’s quite similar to how most people feel about the trillion dollar market value of Bitcoin after learning that they can’t put a single one of the damned things in their leather wallet. Yet these intangibles have made many companies millions if not not billions of dollars.
If starting a software-based business was easy or inexpensive, everyone would be doing it. We’ll often hear something like, “I want to build a product like LinkedIn. It’s already out there, so just clone most of that. Easy, right?” LinkedIn raised $154 million dollars to build and market that product. They were then acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion. That’s billion with a B. So just because software is free from the hard costs of construction material, the time involved can rival that of building a neighborhood of mansions. The media assets alone can get pricey. A well produced company video or professionally shot product photography may quickly exceed the cost of custom cabinets and granite countertops. So is it all worth it? If you are in business, then the answer is yes. We are in the caveman days of internet evolution and there’s no better time than now to jump into this world, because there’s absolutely no going back to the way business was. Anyone can play this game if they are willing to do a little learning and leverage the deep expertise of others that they trust. Going back to my house analogy, I don’t know too much about the charge carriers in the electron of an atom, but I enjoy the lights turning on when flip that switch on the wall. And by that, I mean when I ask Alexa to turn the lights on.
