How Much Does It Cost to Make a Social Media App

Did you know Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger voice and video calling volume doubled in Coronavirus lockdown?

It is impossible to meet-and-greet in the traditional form of socializing. Coronavirus isolation affected not just people, but the entire businesses. In-person communication is no longer possible. According to Joel Golby, in-person communication is ruined forever. In this situation, social media applications play a crucial role. These applications are becoming people’s favorite in many ways. These are:

1. Offering a medium for communication
2. A great source of breaking news
3. Help in keeping the users engaged

According to eMarketer, people nowadays spend only 10% time on the browser. They spend the rest of the time on various social media applications. Even when the virus ends and the world goes back to normal, people may continue with this communication form. Online communication is becoming a lifestyle. It provides an active opportunity for many businesses to wonder how to create and invest in a social media application.

Expectations from a social media application

People are engaged more in social media applications. The primary reason for this is mobile phone usage. Everyone prefers a mobile phone or a tablet, and therefore, there is a noticeable increase in mobile user engagement.

Even without a pandemic, people can’t survive without their phones.

People have different expectations from a social media application. Therefore, a social media application should be useful from the end-user standpoint. Centering a social media application on business is never a good idea. A social media application should be able to:

1. Provide a list of problems that it solves
2. Offer a user-oriented purpose and objectives
3. Determine why should anyone install and use it
4. Offer ease of use, communication, and functionality
5. Provide users with valuable content

Social media applications are the source of nourishment of people’s egos.

If an application helps the users connect, communicate, like, share, and discover valuable content, it satisfies their egos. Social media applications should act as a source of self-affirmation. It is how they become an integral part of people’s lives. Investing in a social media application is valuable in 2021 because people need attention, communication, and intimacy.

Investing in a social media application

Development of a social media application for your business can cost up to $115,000 to $200,000

Social media is a thriving industry. You can have as many examples as you want to redefine success. More than 67% of people use social media and spend more than three hours on it daily. There are certain factors that you need to understand.

1. The primary goals of a social media application
   1. Communication
   2. Promotion
   3. Client loyalty
2. The types of social media applications
   1. Personal contact networks
   2. Dating and intimacy networks
   3. Professional networks
3. Main features of social media application
   1. Onboarding users, authorization, and user profiles
   2. Content creation tool, communication and sharing
   3. Comments, feedback, search, and notifications

Goal specified For the Cost to Make a Social Media App

The primary goal of social media applications is to ensure active communication. Providing an option to communicate by messages increases the engagement levels a great deal. Certain factors add cost to this goal.

1. Having specified directly messaging and private messaging requirements.
2. Let users upload photos and videos in private messaging.
3. Notifying users when the responder reads their message.

These considerations can add costs ranging from $6500 to $8000, respectively. They can take 140 to 200 hours easily. Promotion and client loyalty are some of the other concerns which add costs to the app development. Offering exclusive features such as content sharing, content creation, image filters, etc., can ensure client loyalty. Interactive UX/UI and tagging feature can help promote your application by in-person recommendations. However, these features can add cost up to $15000 to your overall budget.

Category specified social media application cost

Instagram and Facebook are examples of personal contact networks. If you want to build an application like Facebook or Twitter, you need to have a hands-on budget of $150,000. It is because applications like these include the following features as their building blocks:

1. Interactive UX/UI design
2. Tagging and geolocation
3. Search and newsfeed feature
4. Account authorization and profile creation
5. Messaging and photo/video upload

Social media applications that fall in the professional network category, such as LinkedIn, also follow the same pattern. Thus, they would incur, more or less, the same cost of development. Finally, comes the dating and intimacy application. Tinder is an example. Although they also require the afore-mentioned features as their building blocks, they must include some side features. These side features add cost to the development. The price for a dating application generally starts from $170,000. These features are:

1. Private messaging option
2. Privacy settings feature
3. Video/ voice calling and date scheduling

Feature specified social media application cost

You can distribute the cost of social media app development following the features that you want to add. According to Maria Redka, several features support the benefits of a social media application. She mentions that complex features such as grouping and page creation are secondary features. Thus, you can work on them later. However, you cannot ignore UX/UI (not a feature but a necessity), which cost around $3000. Following are the primary features of a social media application.

1. Account authorization. You can expect this feature to take an average time of 70 hours. It usually costs around $3500 to $4500.
2. Profile creation. Adding only the basics such as name, profile picture, mobile number, address, email, and birthday can take around 50 hours. The average cost of profile creation is $2500.
3. Communication tool. If you start with basic messaging tools, they can take up to 150 hours. You are likely to incur costs around $7000 to $8500.
4. Content creation and sharing. A basic photo/video upload feature will take 320 hours. It will add an extra $16000 (average) to your cost.
5. Search feature. This feature will take around 60 hours and add $3000 to your budget.
6. This feature has a high development time variance. Nevertheless, it takes an average time of 125 hours. It will cost around $5000 to $6000.
7. Tagging and geolocation. It is an easy feature. It takes around 24 hours and costs only $2000.

You can get all these features and functions with retrocube.com. We are the best mobile application developers. Contact us today and get your own social media application.