The Ultimate Guide to Food Delivery App Development Cost

Enjoying a football match sitting with your friends calls for a marvellous dine-in with each one’s favourite cuisine at the comfort of your couch. Though catching up with your friends over a football match isn’t anything new or out of the box, the advent of a food delivery app that can serve you different delicacies at your doorstep has definitely been a new experience for those millennial out there. In the past few years, food enterprises and food entrepreneurs have been looking to build quality food delivery apps. To achieve this, it is important to approach a renowned app development company. On-demand food delivery app solutions all around the world are all set to make a revenue of about 0.91 trillion US Dollars in the year 2023.

Talking of soaring progress in the online food delivery sector, we have to mention the one turning point- the pandemic which changed the face of how people look at these online food delivery apps. Clearly, there has been an increase in the usage of food delivery apps during and after the pandemic hit us.

In fact, the story doesn’t end here. The revenue of food delivery apps worldwide is projected to grow at a rate of 12.33% in the CAGR 2023-2027 where 2027 revenue is expected to reach US $1.45 trillion. There are many trending mobile app ideas for startups, and a food delivery app is a promising one. Here, we are going to look at cost of developing a food delivery app in detail.

Why is it important to fix the budget?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what expenditure to expect from the food delivery app development cost, we shall understand the importance of fixing a budget in the process. Fixing a budget helps you comprehend the entire planning structure and take the correct measures for getting your food delivery app developed.

Hence, before hopping into the development of your cloud kitchen business, make sure you keep the following things in mind:

• Helps identify the actual needs: the budget that you fix for your app development aids in contemplating the needs of the end customers thereby giving them what is required at the moment. This way you can easily comprehend the features required for your app and make decisions in the right direction.
• Aids in market research: the moment you sit and contemplate your budget, it forces you to get out there and do extensive market research so that you know the market standards of the rates.
• You need the MVP: the minimum viable product is what will get you through those meetings with the investors. Thus, having a budget is necessary to understand how much and how long will an MVP cost you.
• Need to save for marketing: it is completely foolish to think that your work and expenditure end with the development of the app. There are several steps that lie ahead of the development process. The deployment of the app, its marketing, and making it reach the target audience is the real struggle. You can figure out the on-demand food delivery app development cost but it is the costs that are inferred after the development has been completed which make a huge difference in the success of an app.

What is the overall cost of a food delivery app?

The cost to build a food delivery app has a lot of factors that decide the overall expenditure on the app. We shall talk about those factors in the later section.

Here, let us make you get through an estimated food ordering development cost.

So, a basic food delivery app with basic and functions can cost you anywhere around $12000-$25000. While an app with advanced and multiple features can charge you around $52000 and beyond.

Factors that affect the food delivery app development cost

Any app development has an extensive procedure that is marked by several stages and many factors that decide the ultimate cost of the development of the app. Also, as mentioned above, the procedures that follow the development process play a major role in expenditure on the food delivery app. One has to keep in mind all these aspects while contemplating the cost of developing a food delivery cost. You may read a guide on app development costs for a thorough understanding.

However, here we present you the major elements that you should consider:

Scope: the category of the app that you’re choosing for your app development and the scope of that category to sustain in the market mark an important aspect of how much the app will cost you. Though the niche of the app has already been picked as a food delivery app, the type of app and platform to be used for development will have a say in the overall development cost. Whether you’re thinking of getting a native or a cross-platform app shall differ the costs incurred.

Development time: often, the developers charge enterprises based on the efforts and time invested in the app development. For them, the cost of developing a food delivery app will be directly proportional to the number of hours spent. And, as a matter of fact, the time spent is also dependent on the number of features being included, the kind of platform being used, the expertise of the developer, etc. Food delivery apps are known to take anything between 550-800 hours of development time.

Geographical area: though it might sound absurd at once, the location for which you are planning to develop a food delivery app makes a whole lot of difference in the overall cost of development. Food delivery apps cannot entirely operate digitally. There has to be a connection with the real, offline world to get food for the customers. Thus, where these real-world dynamics and complexities are taking place will impact the price that you have to pay. Also, developers from different countries tend to charge differently for a similar process and product delivery. Make sure you do thorough research on which area is best to hire developers from and which one will help reduce the costs.

Tools and tech stack used: now, it is needless to say that the technology and tools being used for the development of the app are crucial in defining the cost of development of the food delivery app. A food delivery app requires a strong backend structure, analytics board, and a robust admin panel for it to serve the interests of the customers at best. Also, features like cloud services, databases, maps, GPS systems, and cost calculators, which are essential for a food delivery app are also accounted for the cost of development.

Complexity and design: it is quite an obvious fact that the higher the complexity of the app’s design, the more costly it will be for you. The more features you get added, the more you have to pay. But if you are making the right choices considering the needs of the end customers, those costs can be all worth it. If you go a step ahead and think of the gaps in the apps already being used and come up with something that is much required by the customers at this moment, you can win.

App security: it is not only significant for the enterprise to invest in the app security, but is crucial for customers to feel a sense of safety while using the app. These days, there has been an air of insecurity among customers regarding their data. Thus, it is the duty of the enterprise to own the app so that the app’s security is carefully monitored and not compromised at any cost. Measures like end-to-end encryption can be used.

Side costs: in addition to these mainstream costs mentioned above, there are several other aspects that you have to pay for while developing a food delivery app. These include infrastructure costs, marketing of the app costs, getting patents, maintenance of the app, and costs for monitoring the success of the app. All these costs are inevitable for anyone who’s stepping into any app development business.

• Infrastructure: the deployment of the app includes the usage of data servers, domain, and hosting and these are all part of the infrastructure of the app. The cost starts from $300 per month.
• Patent: only applicable if your app has used some entirely new and unique concept. The costs depend on whatever idea you’re interested in protecting from being copied.
• Marketing: as mentioned earlier, marketing is also an imminent part of the app development procedure. You need to set out some expenses for marketing your app to the target customers. It is advisable to keep aside at least $200-$2000 for this purpose.
• Monitoring: once the app has been launched, it needs to be under supervision and constantly monitored for its functioning and validity out there in the real world. Whether the app is able to serve the purpose of the intention with which it was built or not, if the customers like it or not, and whether it fulfils the requirements of the customers or not are all sorts of questions that one needs to ponder upon. Based on the number and type of resources hired, you would require sparing about $2500 for supervision every month.
• Maintenance: the app, once out on the track has to be kept into consideration for its maintenance. The bugs that might occur or the issues that customers might face all need to be solved and maintained by the business owner. To be a reputable food delivery app, you need to ensure that $1000-$5000 is spent on maintenance of the app. To be precise any new feature development or upgrading the app to meet requirements of the new OS is not considered a part of app maintenance and support service.

Key components and development cost structure of the food delivery app

On-demand food delivery app solutions are in the rage these days; nevertheless, they come with a cost. The cost of developing a food delivery can vary based on the app development company that you’re choosing for the process. The app development company creates the merchant, courier, and admin panel apps in addition to the consumer app.

Customer app: a customer app can be built at the expense of around $35,000 taking up around 700 to 900 hours on average to develop. The customers are equipped with an app that can get food and eatables from different stores in their area using the app.

Courier app: this one’s essentially built with the functionality that allows the business to receive orders, pick them up and deliver them to the customers. The customers can view their order details in the app transparently. For this kind of app, the developer needs to make sure that the notifications section is optimally managed. Notifications of order status, balance, delivery, etc. are to be included in the app so that customers get a clear picture of their order. It can cost somewhere between $35000 and takes around 700-900 hours.

Merchant app: this one is for the store owners operating their sales online. The cost of developing this one begins from $35000. A merchant app should have some fundamental features like adding stores, managing sales, managing orders, etc. It is always good to have most of the processes automated for this kind of app because you do not really want to distract store owners from their regular work.

Admin panel: the panel where all the orders couriers, deliveries, and stores are managed is essential to be curated. The development of this one might cost you up to $10000 and take as much as 400-500 hours to finish.

Common challenges when building a food delivery app

There are several apps active all over the world and are being used extensively for food delivery. One can easily find enough literature for research. Yet, there are a few things that can help you along the way which we have mentioned here as challenges.

Doing proper research on the market and the kind of product you’re expecting is always beneficial for a business. You can easily comprehend some of the must-have features of your mobile app through this study.

• Meeting the demands of the customers is one thing, and meeting up to their expectations whilst giving them whatever requests they are making is another, and positively, more difficult to cater to. And all of this has to be managed to keep in mind the business model of the food delivery app that you’re about to build.
• The app shall function optimally and should be stable enough to serve its purpose.
• Although there are many things that one considers while developing an app, it is equally significant to understand that you cannot have a fully feature-loaded app right from the beginning. You can always come back and make changes after studying the needs of the customers in the current times.

Conclusion

The online food delivery market is huge with the number of users touching to 110.8million by 2027. This is a giant playground for all those players in the field who wish to make it big in the online food delivery business. The food delivery app development cost has been discussed in detail above for your reference. You can decide if this is the way ahead for you.

Ashish Parmar

He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Prismetric . An enthusiastic entrepreneur, interested to discuss new app ideas, rich gadget tricks and trends, and admires signature tech business styles to readily embrace. He enjoys learning most modern app crafting methods, exploring smart technologies and passionate about writing his thoughts too. Inventions related to mobile and software technology inspire Ashish and he likes to inspire the like-minded community through the finesse of his work.