How to Calculate Mobile App Design Cost: Key Factors and Pricing Insights

Why Is Mobile App Design So Important?

A study by Forrester found that every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return—a staggering 9900% ROI. Small improvements in brand reputation and mobile presence add up to ensure your UX investment pays off. Here are a few examples of how a good mobile design helps:

• Users keep coming back. 90% of mobile users who had a “helpful” or “relevant” experience would buy from the brand again. At the same time, 46% of those who had an interruptive experience would not repeat their purchases. 

• New users become regulars. 94% of first impressions are design-related, whether it’s loading time, navigation, or layout. They are especially valuable for converting new users who do not have positive experiences and associations with the brand.

• Sales numbers rise. According to McKinsey, companies with good design outperformed industry-benchmark growth by nearly twice in revenue and returns to shareholders. 

• User trust increases. 72% of users will tell more than six people in their circle if they are happy with their experience. Meanwhile, 13% of those unsatisfied with UX will share this information with 15+ people. 

• Your app rises in App Store rankings. Google Play and App Store rankings account for conversions, user retention rates, and customer feedback. As we’ve established, good UX can boost all of the above.

• Good UX sets your app apart from the competition. Although positive experiences are often hard to quantify, satisfied users usually choose mobile apps with good UX over those with poor design and customer support.

All things considered, it’s no wonder that established businesses, like Virgin America, Bank of America, Airbnb, and others, invest in UX to boost conversions and revenue. 

Stages Influencing App Design Price 

Some think a UI/UX designer’s job is just about creating the interface, but that’s only scratching the surface. A skilled designer will research your target audience, craft thoughtful user interactions, and choose a color palette that aligns with your brand. All of this, of course, impacts the cost and the overall quality of the final product.

Research

Solid research of requirements is the basis of any product development lifecycle. So, it has to be deep and extensive. It should include your target audience, competitors, main market trends, and more.

Getting into solid research will allow achieving a user-friendly and usable design. This design will enhance your business and make you on top of your competitors.

The app design cost at this stage will base on the following answers:

• what is the app’s general complexity?
• how many hours will it take to gather and process requirements?
• how to comply with the technical implementation?

• what is the number of features needed?
• what will the mobile development architecture be like?
• what is the platform you want to cover?
• how many hours are spent on team meetings?
• were there any extra efforts of a business analyst, software architect, and UX/UI designer?

UX design

Building a UX design, or prototyping is quite a big process, where you get to see how your app will look in the end. But, most importantly, you can make changes during the process. And, this way, save up your project budget, and time.

This phase may or may not involve the following:

Sketching

Sketching is adhered to when the app is complex and has to include lots of features and difficult navigation. This way, designers carry out sketches to show the basic features of the app. These features are the most important ones and show the app’s actual functionality. They may use Figma or a similar tool to do that.

Usually, a designer works with a business analyst to make sketches. It may take them up to 24 hours to make these hand drawings. The work of both and the hours spent on sketches will surely impact mobile app design price.

Wireframing

Wireframing aims at making the structure of the future application. And, it also, make the user flow. It is the skeleton of the app. The time spent on one app screen can be more than 2 hours. The time spent on a screen can be more than 30 minutes. 

Everything depends on the designer’s experience. Or, the tools used. And, mainly, the complexity of the app. If the app is complex and requires lots of screens – count the progress in days. What’s more, app complexity impacts the app design price heavily.

Native UI elements

Figma is the tool that helps in making a detailed structure of the design. You can use it to add the needed fonts, buttons, and control styles. Also, to add native UI components. Some projects may use this type of design to create a basic interface. You can save costs here for this design will be soft of an MVP. To read more on how to create a minimum viable product, follow the link.

This approach may take you more than 2.5 hours per one app screen. And, more than 40 minutes per subscreen. To add, sometimes designers can’t use ready-made UI components and they design these components from scratch. Which, adds up to the design time and costs.

UI design

Visualizing everything a user wants to see is one of the best ways to resolve user pain points. And, why not? After UX wireframes, you receive UI mockups. These are the design product you work with further. You may give them a more stylized look and make them stand out among competitors.

To understand what the whole UI will look like, it is vital to create UI mockups. They will serve as experiments with style, elements, forms, shades, color schemes, etc. So, before doing something major as the whole UI, it will be essential to play with the style components and see whether you can create something innovative and fitting.

But, the process will require:

• up to 8 hours to create a mood board
• up to 20 hours to create samples of UI mockup (up to 3 options for 2 screens)
• up to 20 hours to finalize the mockup with the unique design

Of course, everything depends on the app’s complexity and the number of screens.

Read also about custom image analysis software development.

Branding

Then the process turns to brand design. It includes logos, fonts, and illustrations. First, you’ll need to create a mood board, and then the logo itself. But if you are a business, then you need to have your logos placed within the app.

To create a logo the right way, you should:

1. Have an idea and research it (up to 16 hours)
2. Create a logo sample (up to 24 hours)
3. Finalize your logo (depends on app complexity)

Illustrations and animations

Every illustration in an app should transmit the app’s main purpose. For this reason, illustrations can be of different styles. And, the time to create at least one will vary according to the app’s complexity. So, count on up to 32 hours of designer’s work.

What’s more difficult than illustrations in an app? Of course, animations. They should be dynamic images. And, might be time-consuming indeed. So, let’s just say up to a week. And, it will be ok in terms of complexity and quality.

Learn more about benefits of POC 

Factors That Impact the Cost of Designing a Mobile App

Different platforms

How much does it cost to design an app for iPhone? Is it more expensive than designing Android apps? 

Although Android and iOS apps seem similar at first glance, the platforms rely on two sets of design guidelines: Material Design and Human Interface Guidelines. As a result, even tiny design decisions can diverge. For example, Android apps can use the back button, while iOS solutions need in-app navigation. 

At the same time, the overall iOS and Android app design cost and timeline do not differ much. But you will need to pay twice as much to develop two native apps. Cross-platform development can offer up to 50% cost savings, but it doesn’t always account for all the architecture and UX differences between Android and iOS.

Design Team Structure 

An in-house cost to design an app can be a fortune, considering the average hourly rate for a UX designer in the US is around $55. Outsourcing software development, including UX design, to offshore vendors can dramatically reduce your budget. Still, the bottom line will depend on the vendor’s location, its mobile development experience, and the level of experts engaged in your project. 

We’ve also compiled a comparison table to help you estimate the cost of app design based on mean regional rates, according to Glassdoor.

Complexity

Simple UI does not always equal fast and cheap design and development. The complexity of your app is defined by the number of advanced features, the use of built-in mobile hardware, and third-party integrations via APIs. Security considerations and admin features can also affect the complexity of the app. From a UX design perspective, simple apps only have a handful of screens and little to no customization and branding, affecting mobile app design price per screen. Complex apps may require unique UX designs created from the ground up. Here’s a more detailed look at the design differences between simple and complex apps.

Design Iterations

The iterative development helps design intuitive and user-friendly applications that solve real problems while keeping costs down. However, iterative design’s benefits are only apparent if you analyze the prototypes to improve them instead of constantly introducing new requirements and ideas. Each additional iteration takes time, which ultimately drives up the cost. You can mitigate this by iterating the UX design at a wireframe and prototype stage, but that’s not always possible. 

You can estimate the price of each UX design iteration by multiplying the hourly app designers’ cost by the number of hours. For instance, reworking the looks of a simple app with a handful of pages will take two to five days and cost up to $1,000 if you work with an affordable outsourcing vendor.

Mobile App Design Cost Breakdown

So, how much does app design cost? With so many factors affecting the mobile app UX design cost, it can be hard to get a full picture. Our estimates in the table below should help you understand how the app’s complexity, your choice of platform, design trends, and the team you choose to design your app can affect the bottom line.

How to Cut the Cost of Design an App?

Everyone wants to cut costs, but the key is to ensure that it doesn’t impact quality. User satisfaction relies heavily on how well your design is built. To save money without sacrificing quality, you need a solid plan. Based on our experience, we’ve got a few tips to help.

1. Make a deep and extensive project plan

If you think planning is a tiresome and unneeded activity – you are wrong. Planning can give you a full idea of what you need to accomplish and the cost of designing an app. If you can’t deal with planning and research on your own, there is a way out.

Try a discovery phase service. This is the practice, where you can save up costs, time, and efforts on building a mobile app solution. How? A discovery phase aims at giving you extensive documentation on your product’s advantages and disadvantages. Also, it provides comments and recommendations. With the help of this phase, you can develop your app according to a plan.

2. Hire a professional team to carry out your project

The team you will work with has to be on the same page with you in almost everything. As you will have to communicate with designers most of the time to transmit your ideas and check what they’ve done. The more you cooperate – the better. People on your team have to understand what is the scope of the design project and what are your preferences. This way your mobile app UI design cost will be lower. Mainly, because there will be no misunderstandings, errors, or things to fix.

3. Be as specific with your requirements as possible

If you hire an excellent team – this is only 50% of success. The rest of it is based on the correct and detailed communication of your needs to the team. And, also, take into account the stakeholders’ requirements. You should heal everyone on your team (investors, partners, etc.) to make sure nothing is missing.

4. Be realistic according to project deadlines and human efforts

If you have a deadline, the team may or may not meet it. To cut costs, listen to the timeframes the team suggests to you. These are most likely the real deployment timeframes there will be. They include every stage of design and the number of hours used to complete each task.

5. Design an MVP

Designing a full product may take you more time, more human effort, and more money. Why won’t you get an MVP first? This will be a complete app with minimum features present. But it will function as it should. And, what’s more, you will receive useful feedback. It’s easier to alter an MVP than the whole product. And you will save up costs.

How much does app maintenance cost?

Consider Inoxoft your trusted partner

The Inoxoft team has over a decade of iOS and Android design and development experience. Our mobile development professionals realize the value of UI/UX design and craft in a way to help our clients achieve their business goals.

Design development at Inoxoft is intertwined with business analysis and requirements definition. Our business analyst engages in processing project details for UI/UX designers. And, then, the creative team cooperates with the BA to understand solutions completely. This strategy helps to achieve mobile design goals. And, give you an understanding of how to monetize your app.

How We Created a Functional and Visually Pleasing On-Demand Delivery App

The Inoxoft team helped a US-based entrepreneur develop a convenient on-demand home fuel delivery and refill service. ReFuelrs matches buyers and sellers without the need to deal with federal and state regulations regarding home fuel distribution.

Our UX design team suggested the purple and orange palette and designed a logo reflecting the company’s mission. Roboto was chosen as the main font. We created clean, minimalistic account pages and order and bid workflows for buyers and sellers. Aside from an integrated payment system with a tip option, Inoxoft integrated a familiar chat interface to let buyers and sellers get in touch and iron out delivery details. Finally, our team designed an admin panel to manage roles and access, generate reports, and check seller applications against state regulations.

It took our team six months to go from the discovery phase to launching the web platform and mobile apps for iOS and Android. We used Flutter to develop a cross-platform application supplemented by AWS, JS, and PostgreSQL.

Final Thoughts

The mobile app UX design budget depends on whether you need a native or a cross-platform app and its complexity. Most importantly, the cost hinges on the team you work with. And Inoxoft is here to help you capitalize on the benefits of good UX design. 

How much does it cost to design a mobile app for you? Use our app design calculator to estimate the cost, or contact us to schedule a consultation to receive a more precise estimate.