Table of content

1. How does the social media app development process look?
2. What do social media platform development costs include?
3. What’s the difference between a full project and an MVP estimation?
4. How to estimate the costs of social media platforms?
5. Why it’s so hard to precisely estimate the costs of social media apps?
6. You’re ready to build your social media app!

Social media platforms are increasingly popular, so I’m not surprised that you’re about to develop your own app of this kind.

At this stage, I assume you’ve decided what kind of social media app you want to build and what features it should have. If that’s not that clear to you, I suggest you check my article about how to develop such an app, where you can find a comprehensive overview of social media app types and common features and questions you should ask to establish your needs.

I also assume that you already know what you want to develop – an MVP or a full product. If you haven’t decided yet, check my article on MVP development to study the benefits of such an approach.

This article will focus on pricing and estimating a social media app development cost. To make it as clear as possible, I’ll discuss the pricing of cross-platform and web social media apps (for an MVP and a full app).

How does the social media app development process look?

Social media app development is much more than only building features of your app-to-be. Regarding the app development cost, you need to consider the whole process of building your revolutionary app, from the discovery phase to the post-launch maintenance and further improvements (don’t forget about the cost of marketing activities, too).

Discovery phase

Before your development team writes a single line of code, you need to know exactly what you want to build (maybe you’ll find some new ideas?). That means you not only need a game-changing idea but also make sure there’s a demand on the market for your app and it addresses the exact needs of the target audience. You also need to ensure you and your software developer are on the same page.

During the discovery phase, you and your development team (especially a business analyst) will make a business analysis to reveal your business goals (and make them measurable). You need to understand the competition (competitive social media platforms) and your target audience and then create a product strategy (with a unique value proposition).

It’s most likely that a software developer of your choice will set up a workshop to discuss all the details mentioned above and gain all the information needed (including tech stack, targeting on one or multiple platforms, the budget you have assigned etc.) to prepare a rough scope of work with a timeline and estimation of your social media app.

If the company of your choice has a similar approach to ours, they will also suggest going through user stories to discover the usage scenarios. Depending on the project complication, they might also advise you to create wireframes to plan how exactly the app should behave. Although that model will probably change during the development process, it will help your project manager to assess the costs as precisely as possible.

The main goal of the discovery phase is always understanding the target audience – their needs, desires and preferences – to build a perfect social media app that will succeed and brings a significant return on investment.

Although this stage might take some time, you’ll save a lot of time and money later.

Design

Knowing everything about the target audience makes you ready to design the perfect user experience and user interface. It’s about how the social media app should behave and how it should look.

You really do need a design team. I refer you to the article by Patrycja Warszeka, our main designer, to read more about the process of designing an app and the role of a design team on the project.

I want you to keep in mind one thing about the user experience. It should be transparent. Your users should not be forced to think about it using the app. If they do, that means your social network app is not properly designed. It’s like stairs – you don’t think about them until they are not too high or deep to climb up.

Development

App development starts when you have your social media app designed. The development phase consists of coding and testing that goes simultaneously.

App developers are building your app based on the chosen technology stack (the architecture and features, backend and front-end). They are indeed making the app alive.

Quality assurance engineers start their job when the social media app is accessible. They need to conduct different tests (e.g. performance, security and usability, to mention just a few types) to ensure every part of the app works as planned. All the issues found are immediately fixed by developers.

You can rest assured that your project manager will advice you when is the right time to release the app.

Launch and maintenance

When your social media app works as planned, it’s time to show them to people. Make sure that your app developers will maintain your social network app.

Depending on your business goals, you can do that in a few different ways. You might launch a not-perfect but functional minimum-viable product for everyone, allow pioneers to gain early access or launch a fully-featured app (with no previous feedback from the market). Each one has its pros and cons, and you need to define which way to go in the very beginning (during the discovery phase).

Fully accessible MVP

You can test your idea and improve the app by giving people a social media MVP. If the app is not what people expected, you’ll know that and have an opportunity to change the direction (and the idea, maybe). The pros of this approach are also that you can launch the app pretty quickly and start gaining users and earning.

Early access mode

If you decide to open your app for chosen ones (registered users via landing page or selected people for testing purposes), you can test your app with a lower risk of losing users. Those people might feel special as they have access before others and might become ambassadors of your brand and spread the news about your product if they love your social media app.

Full product launch

Finally, you can build a fully-featured social media app before making it public. You can offer your users a perfect app that they dreamt about (because they really dreamt about it, right? 🙂 ), but you risk that it won’t suit their real needs. In such a case, you certainly lose a lot of money (that’s why proper preparation is a must). If you wait until the whole app is finished, you must be aware that you won’t launch your social media app quickly (and, therefore, might lose some market share and income).

What do social media platform development costs include?

Probably now you understand why the “cost of features” is not the same as the “cost of social media app development”. Building an app is not only about features. You can read more about general app development costs in my article on that point.

The costs you find below are estimated for cross-platform mobile apps. However, those might also refer to web app development as well.

If you want to develop a progressive web app (PWA) instead of a mobile application, you might decrease the development cost by 5%-10%.

If you’re about to develop a regular web app that looks good on mobile devices, the app cost estimation might be lower, around 15%, from what you’ll find below.

Now, let’s discuss the social media app development cost in detail. Remember, however, that the estimation might vary significantly depending on many factors (see the pre-final chapter of this text to learn more), so the amounts presented below are just a hint, not a binding quote.

What’s the difference between a full project and an MVP estimation?

Below you’ll find estimated social media app development cost for full products and MVPs. In the case of MVPs, I suggest you skip some additional features if those are not key elements of your social network app.

What I would like you to remember is that the price difference not always depends on the number of features we’ll build. In some cases, the same set of features can be developed with less effort (and therefore – fewer billing hours and lower app cost) but at the price of how the app looks and behaves.

In many cases, an MVP doesn’t need to look perfect on any device or have animated elements and transitions between screens. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be as scalable and optimised as a full app. As usual, the devil is in the details.

To make all the estimations, I used the average Eastern European hourly rate ($50) as we are located in Poland, but the final cost will vary, among others, depending on the region where your app development company is located (you can read more about destinations on our blog).

How to estimate costs of social media platforms?

Product Analysis and Design

As you know, before writing a single line of code for your social network, you need to fully understand what you want to build and for whom. You also need to ensure you and your development crew are on the same page. That’s why you need workshops and product analysis that will take around 160 hours. If you skip this step, you might build a stunning social media app, but totally incongruent with the target audience’s needs (which means it might fail).

The next elements you need are wireframes and user flows. You need to define how users will navigate through your app, what elements it should have and what screens are required. That will also help you to list user stories (the goals users might want to fulfil in your social media app) and create tasks for the backlog. That stage will take around 320 hours in total.

Finally, you must design the app by creating a high-fidelity design for your social network app (another 320 hours). It’s what front-end developers require to start their job.

A social media MVP is a smaller project that doesn’t need to be perfect, so it will take less time to go through all those stages in this case, but at the end of the day, this phase is always a must.

Architecture and Setup

Now, your team must create an app architecture and set up the project.

Nowadays, most of the apps (not only social media ones but all in general) are based on cloud services (which are made for scalability, among others). For this reason, you don’t need your own physical architecture, just a cloud services provider (we work with AWS in most cases).

MVPs are less demanding and, therefore, less time-consuming, but keep in mind that if they aren’t designed to work at a large scale (which is not a must), you might need to redevelop your app immediately if it succeeds and gain a broad audience.

User Authentication

Social media users must be able to sign up, log in and recover or change their password – that’s pretty obvious regardless of what social media app you are about to build.

The point is, which additional features are crucial from your clients’ perspective? Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your app need a 2-factor authentication?
• Do you need a passwordless login?
• Should users be able to log in using other social media accounts? Which ones?

If it’s an MVP, the answer will probably be “no” unless you’re about to develop a specific social media app for which a passwordless login will be a must-have feature.

As you can see, it all depends on your idea and goals.

Account and profile

Every social media app needs to allow user profile creation, store those data, and entitle users to edit them. Users should also be able to delete or deactivate their accounts. Those might not be so pretty in an MVP version, but those are must-have features anyway.

The key is how secure your app should be and how the preferences should be managed. If it comes to an MVP, you might set some account data privacy settings and preferences by default, which decrease app cost (and add them later when the app succeeds and your company starts generating profits).

Posts publication

It’s quite obvious that every social media app user needs to publish posts, add hashtags and be able to mention other users – those are essential features of such an app.

However, there are more features you can implement in a full app to make it more attractive. Consider whether you need advanced features like additional media-driven post types (crucial in the case of media sharing networks), a rich text editor (especially for a mobile application which is a development challenge; we know that because we’ve built some apps with this feature), image editor and post management (privacy settings, deleting, drafts).

Adding every one of them will increase the overall cost. I can advise you to consider carefully whether you need such features right now, or maybe it’s better to postpone the development of those and add them to the roadmap for your social media app’s further improvements.

News feed

A news feed is another one of the must-have features for a social media app. Everyone should see a list of posts with relevant content (based on recommendations and taking into account their interests and activities), be able to navigate through them, and see their own activity (even at a very basic level).

I would say that all those features are also required in an MVP version of a social media app.

To decrease costs, you can implement a tool like the TeaRex.AI recommendation engine that is flexible and ready to adjust to any type of content (even for a full version of the app). That gives you an opportunity to use the power of AI/ML at a low cost (it’s a free tool for apps with less than 50 000 visits a month).

Post activities and reactions

Likes and comments are basic features of any social media app, but it’s up to you what other possibilities your app should offer to users. For many social app types, it might be crucial for most users to be able to share what other users create or have more range of reactions than just liking a post.

Keep in mind that a variety of activities increases user engagement, but it requires funds to be developed. For this reason, it’s worth starting small with an MVP and implementing more features when the project is already on the market and you have some user feedback (that also indicates the direction you should be heading towards).

For security purposes, you should also consider providing people with a blocking feature and the possibility of reporting abuse.

Connecting and acquaint

Social media apps are about getting acquainted, there’s no doubt. For this reason, this is a must-have feature in social networking app development.

For a basic social media app, it might be enough to satisfy users if they can follow each other, but if you want to increase customer engagement, you might think about the ‘add to friends’ feature, invitations and privacy settings.

Searching

In my opinion, there are two must-have features for searching – users and hashtags. The cost of developing them will be the same in the full project and MVP.

A more advanced social media app can offer to search by the content of the post and data types.

Content storing and files sharing

If it comes to a basic functionality of a social media app, we can omit editing files and sharing them with different permissions. The main features are uploading files, storing and removing them.

In the case of media-sharing networks, you might need some more advanced data formats that exceed video and photo content.

Chat – Messaging and Calling

Social media apps are, above all, places where users chat. For this reason, the messaging feature is a must. If you’re about to develop an MVP, it might be enough to offer text messaging in a simple form with image sharing and conversation status checks.

If you want to add some more advanced features, you might consider a real-time user activity indicator that shows whether the message was read or the person is already writing, editing and deleting messages and reactions to them.

If you’re about to develop an app like WhatsApp or Messenger, that might not be enough for you as you might need an audio message or audio and video calling.

Notifications

Notifications are another of must-have features of social media apps, as they boost user engagement and invite people to turn back to the app.

You must decide what types of notifications you need (email, push, in-app messages) and for what kinds of events. It’s one of the advanced features, but you also might want to allow them to manage their notifications preferences.

Events

Depending on your goals, you might not need the events feature at all, or that might be a core feature of your app. In the second case, even an MVP should allow to creation and deletion of events and invite people to participate in them (and conduct discussions).

For the more advanced features, I would include editing events, visibility and privacy settings. It’s nice to have but not necessary when building the first version of your social media app. The same refers to the moderation of the event – you probably don’t need it in a very basic app.

Groups

Groups usually gather like-minded people in terms of interests, passion or problems. Although groups are a part of many complex social media apps like Facebook, discussion forums use this functionality, too.

Social apps with a group feature should allow people to manage them, and in many cases, there’s no difference between a full product and MVP. It’s very important to provide users with the possibility to discuss via group chats or post comments.

If you want to decrease costs, I suggest you postpone the development of roles, permissions and moderation features.

Streaming Live

Live streaming is more and more popular and has become a part of many social media platforms. Trending social media apps like Facebook or TikTok offer the opportunity to broadcast live, which seems to be the format that will be expanded and promoted by many platforms (given these apps’ success stories).

Your social media users might need not only the possibility to attend but also manage the privacy and visibility of their live stream and chat.

Ratings and Gamification

People love to play games, and you might want to implement a gamification feature in your app. I can even imagine a social media app where it’s a core feature, actually.

When gamification is concerned, you might need rating and scoring features, leaderboards and assigning points logic. It might be tricky, but experienced app developers will certainly handle the challenge (check out Beat the Street app as an example).

Personalisation and Customisation

Personalisation and customisation might be especially important for you if your app is planned as a ‘social media as a service’ solution for other companies. They should be able to modify how the app looks and adjust it to their needs. The app should also be easily deployed as a separate app.

To offer the app as a service, you will also need an admin panel to manage and verify users – your clients. For other social media apps (that are not delivered in a SaaS model for other companies), you probably won’t need these features.

Analytics

Analytics should be implemented in every social media app and allow users (individual people or companies) to analyse how their content performs, what activities are taken upon it and discover trends.

Monetisation models

I’m sure you want to generate revenue on your app, so you should also consider how to do that. There are several options possible:

• Paid content promotion
• Paid features
• Subscription model
• Earning model for content creators

Administration Panel

You should also manage your social media app – users, content and system settings. That should also be calculated in the final estimation.

Other social media app development costs

In the end, we cannot forget about the additional elements of the software development process like code quality and version control, quality assurance, maintenance and project management.

Those are elements that depend on the overall estimation. You should increase the estimation by a specific per cent value to assess the cost. It’s because the bigger and more complicated the social media app, the more time it takes to address all those elements of the development process.

Those costs might be reduced in a social network MVP app. Many of those tasks you can take over (like quality assurance testing). Keep in mind, however, that those activities must always be taken. The fact that they are not included in the final estimation doesn’t mean you won’t pay for them. Quite the opposite – if the software developer of your choice won’t address them properly, you will be responsible to do that. Otherwise, you might offer your users a buggy social media app that will discourage them from using it and affects your company’s image.

Why it’s so hard to precisely estimate the costs of social media apps?

As you probably noticed, all the estimations provided in this article are generic and not precisely adjusted to your needs. It’s because it’s extremely hard to assess the cost of a particular app without knowing all the requirements.

There are many elements that affect the final cost of social media apps. It depends on:

• With what 3rd party services should the app integrate? Should it use APIs?
• How much data will the app store and process (Big Data solutions are more challenging)?
• How many users will the app serve? A full app should work on a large scale, but an MVP doesn’t have to.
• Is there any legacy code or solution with which the social network app should be integrated?
• How many standard and non-standard features should the app have?
• How quickly should the app be built? What’s the timeline?
• How many changes will be made during the project?

All those factors affect the final cost of social media apps, and it’s impossible to assess it precisely without a deep-dive understanding of the project.

That means no one will ever assess the social media apps’ costs precisely without the discovery phase.

You’re ready to build your social media app!

Now you know how to assess a social media app development cost (roughly, at least) and what an estimation consists of. You’re ready to run a successful social networking app development project.

If you need a precise estimation for your social app, feel free to drop me a line to discuss your app idea!

I’d be more than happy to be a part of a social media revolution!