What are reasonable price levels and time scales for an intuitive, usable mobile app?

Great question - my firm builds and helps migrate/support dozens of mobile apps each year. There are several questions that need to be answered before a reliable estimate can be given. For example, are you strictly seeking a native mobile app? If so, which platforms? Will the mobile apps shared a backend with the existing web application, or will it be stand alone? have you outlined the UI and UX yet? produced wirefarmes, technical specifications documents or any information architecture outlines?

Simply put, there are items in most mobile app projects that do tend to require more time investment (which next to the location of where you build the app is of course the most important driver of cost/quality): this would include things like UI/UX, API documentation, Technical Documentation and Testing- most of the time, the actual core development of an application (assuming you are investing in the above appropriately) comes down to block and tackling and just executing the strategy you lay out ahead of time.

All of that being said, based on the limited information I have now, this certainly sounds like an application that could be on the faster side of the delivery timeline. If you'd like to get a few drilled-down and accurate tiers on pricing, timeline and some suggested next steps, feel free to reach out and we can discuss further over a quick call.

The key is to understand how apps are built and maintained and what is the relative cost, benefit, and downfall of each option. Before we get into the biggest hidden costs of app development, it is important that you understand the mobile app architecture. Let us drill deeper into each of these to see which individual roles they play in your mobile app costs. It is hard to imagine an app that does not utilize this essential mobile capability. If you want push services, you will need a service like UrbanAirship or PushWoosh. You will want to use these services to encourage sharing and upvoting your content through social media. To integrate SMS messaging into your mobile app, you will have to use a service like Twilio. As a creative professional, you want to be in control and avoid calling the IT department every time you want to access your data or update content. The traditional app development solution does not offer a way to save up on these costs. Simply not including these in your app management is not an option as it would take away your control over the content, users and data. If you can edit a Word document, you should be able to edit your app content – this capability is a must for your dashboard. Dashboard emulator. You will want to see how changes you make look on the app before pushing them outlive to the user community. Functional services management. Separate dashboards for each of your services are very impractical. Capabilities like monitoring social behaviour and sending push notifications, emails and SMS are vital for your app, and routine tasks of managing these services should all be available from a single dashboard. Dynamic updates. Some apps require an elaborate resubmission process every time a simple content change is made. Ensure you build in a dynamic update process whereby a simple click of a button on the app dashboard pushes out the content changes to all apps automatically. User profiles. You will need a way to manage your users’ profiles. It is unlikely all administrators or users will be the same. Data segmentation. You will want to classify users into different categories based upon activity, profile, and other parameters. This is useful for messaging and push notifications to users based on a segment they fall into.
These services include infrastructural components such as where the app is hosted, where data is stored and how the data is delivered. Data storage. Data is king, and your app will collect and contain a lot of it. It is crucial that you understand how and where the data will be stored. CDN services are provided by companies like Akamai, CloudFront and Dyn. Images data. Most apps use a lot of images. Such services are provided by companies like CloudImage.io, Google and ImageX. Development tools, libraries, and support. If you are using paid deployment tools like IBM MobileFirst, Kinvey, Kony or Appcelerator to develop your apps on, you will need to subscribe to it over the life of your app. While these services are not an actual part of the app architecture, ongoing technical support is the critical component of any app deployment and it may account for large costs over time. Your resources should always enable you to address the following iOS and Android updates. Even if you have a dynamic update process, there will be times when updates require resubmission. Every app usually has multiple third-party APIs they interact with, especially at the enterprise level. Changes to any of these applications will require periodic maintenance of your APIs. User communities are not kind to apps that are slow to address the issues they report. Maintenance costs. The key issue with mobile app development cost is the number of individual components you need to assemble. You have seen in our mobile app development cost breakdown that these costs grow into the most expensive items in your mobile app budget, continuing for as long as your app is available. You only pay us a fixed monthly subscription, which gives you access to all the features and abilities to develop, deploy, and maintain your mobile app from a single dashboard. It simply means you will never have to pay the high costs of infrastructure and code maintenance, analytics, or expensive developer hours for a simple code fix.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath