How Much Does It Cost to Develop an IoT Application: A Case Study-Based Roadmap

Prioritize the functionalities and features you'd like to have in your project by dividing them into the vital ones and the ones that aren’t so necessary at the first stage. This will help you to understand how much your project’s core costs and what the cost of further development stages is. This will also help you to cut off all the features that are not that essential at first, decreasing the initial expenses.

 
 

UI/UX interfaces

In our opinion, one of the most valuable aspects of IoT software design is user-friendliness. The easier it’s to use the app — the better retention rate you may expect. The complexity of your project's design can significantly influence the cost of IoT mobile application development, leading to variations in the overall development expenses. We recommend sticking to non-complex and intuitive design decisions in order not to overload the user's experience along with the project’s budget.

We’d like to list several inner aspects that affect IoT product development costs and speed up the delivery at the design stages:

• General practices. It’s quite common to observe the tendencies and decisions that are used among the companies of your segment. If there’s a common design decision found in different companion apps, there’s no need to complicate the development by trying to invent something extraordinary. The main advice if you prioritize lower costs and faster development — stick with simplicity.

• Responsive design. On one hand, it’s a significant challenge for designers to predict and adapt your project’s interface to every possible smart appliance, however, it may create excessive spending that isn’t so essential from the start. Our advice is to determine several main devices at the design stage and focus on development, as you can always adapt to new ones in the future when it becomes necessary.

• Existing libraries/decisions. We recommend implementing more already existing libraries and features that perform essential functions to lower your expenditures. If your goal is to make a good product without spending tremendous amounts of money — don’t overlook taking existing design solutions and prototyping tools into consideration. It’s always cheaper to give up a few potential features than to design everything from scratch.

 
 

🔍 What are the So-Called “Hidden Costs” for IoT Development?

Considering IoT software creation with the help of a Tech Team, you always stick to the numbers provided by the specialists you hire. However, this number doesn’t always include the expenditures on the third-party services that your project requires.

This includes various platforms for managing databases, making cloud computing effective, or gathering statistics. Here are some of them, that you may require in your project development:

• Firebase. This is a platform that allows you both to build and monitor your future software. Providing you with the tools to synchronize and store your data conveniently, it also ensures a high security level and scalability for your project. Firebase is a unique service that lets you set up your authentication even if you require an Identify Platform implementation. Among all the features for cloud storing and data structuring it also allows you to gather precise statistics and performance monitoring with the help of Google Analytics, Crashlytics, and TestLab.
• Hygraph. The Federated Content Platform that allows the creation of a unified content layer from any source for further delivery to any required platform. It uses a GraphQL API to set up a unique federation approach to distributing your content from any place to selected platforms. Hygraph also provides you with an easy-to-use content management interface with schematization features to structurize your content in your own way.
• DigitalOcean. In case you have your own database already set up, you need a platform to deploy an IoT app for proper cloud-based computing and storing features. DigitalOcean is one of such services that provide an easy code deployment along with granting a top-tier security level for your project. Quick API integration is also one of the trump cards of this platform, making adding features to your software less complicated.

There are many examples of third-party services that may come in handy for the success of your IoT project, including those aimed at wearables. Every single of them has its monthly/annual cost that shouldn’t be overlooked in your budget estimates.

 
 

📉 How to Safely Reduce IoT App Development Cost and Avoid Money Waste?

As the variety of solutions is so vast, it’s hard to determine what you should do to reduce the IoT software development costs. However, we’d like to share some tips that will help you make your development costs сlean of excessive spendings.

 

Conduct a proper Project Discovery Stage

We recommend you not underestimate the Discovery Phase in a project’s lifespan and consider outsourcing this phase to specialized firms that can conduct it efficiently and cost-effectively. Obviously, conducting the DS costs much less than it may cost you to deal with the consequences of improper planning. If you focus on prevention, such as integrating notifications compatibility in the planning phase, and not on the cure, it’ll significantly save your finances, as fixing errors costs way more than thoroughly planning on their prevention.

For a better understanding of what a Project Discovery Stage is, feel free to click the link down below and acquaint yourself with how it’s usually done.