Software Development Costs
Estimates, Key Cost Factors, Cost-Cutting Measures
With the background of 33 years in software dev and 3,300 successful IT projects, ScienceSoft is ready to provide the cost estimates for your project and take on the implementation.
Software Development Costs: The Essence
Software development costs for a medium/large application may range from $50K to $1M. The total amount mainly depends on the number and complexity of software features and its design patterns. Also, such factors as the type of development (custom, low-code, or platform-based) and the team involved (their roles, seniority, and location) play an important role.
Key Cost Components of Software Development Projects
During this stage, the project team:
- Analyzes the short and long-term company needs, existing processes and software.
- Gathers functional requirements and plans software features.
- Prepares UX design, which describes how users will interact with the system.
- Creates the project roadmap, makes resource and budget estimates.
- Assesses potential project constraints and risks.
In the design phase, the team transforms the requirements specification into a structure that can be implemented using a specific tech stack.
We can divide design into two areas:
- Technical design or software architecture design, which describes the software layers and modules, integrations among them, data structures used by different modules, and the required algorithms.
- UI design, which describes what the software end users see.
Back-end developers write server-side code and APIs and conduct unit tests. Front-end developers turn static user interface mockups provided by UI designers into fully functional GUIs.
To reduce software development costs:
- Establish development and delivery automation environments (CI/CD, container orchestration, etc.). A professionally implemented CI/CD process helps integrate, test, and deploy new software functionality within 2-3 hours and reduces development costs by up to 78%.
- Consider low-code development. This approach helps make software development process up to 4 times cheaper and 10 times faster. A low-code application platform (LCAP) is currently the most popular low-code development technology. LCAPs (e.g., Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, Mendix) provide visual drag-and-drop modules that simplify and streamline building new apps.
- Use ready-to-use cloud services for storage, event processing, integration, data management and analytics, ML, monitoring, and more.
The team checks if the software meets the specified functional and non-functional requirements and reports on the revealed defects, if any. Although we list QA as a separate stage here, it often runs along with the development, and the most effective QA runs throughout the SDLC: from requirements gathering to software maintenance.
To reduce QA and testing costs:
- Consider test automation. If it’s feasible, it can reduce testing cost and time by 20%.
- Shift QA left as much as possible. The cost of fixing defects is much higher than the cost of preventing them.
5. Software deployment
Duration: ~ 2 weeks
At this stage, the team makes software available for use. This may include installation, customization, user acceptance testing, creating user guidelines, and user training.
Once the software is launched, it will require routine maintenance from either a dedicated support team or the original developers. This includes fixing bugs that surface after the software gets delivered to the end users, handling the changing requirements, optimizing the software and its infrastructure for better performance, scalability, cost-efficiency, closing security gaps (if any), and more.
To reduce software costs at the maintenance stage:
- Continuously identify the smallest resources needed and terminate the unused capacity.
- Track the unused services and terminate them if they’re not needed any more.
- Consider your cloud provider’s pricing models: maybe your app satisfies the requirements that would allow using cloud resources at a significant discount. E.g., with Reserved Instances from Azure or AWS, you can have cloud fees reduced by 72-75% if your demand for computing resources is unlikely to decrease within the commitment period.
Software Development Services by Loginet
In software product development since 1989, Loginet knows well how to plan and deliver effective, selling software products. Our service offering includes:
Software development consulting
- Idea conceptualization and competition analysis.
- Holistic functionality.
- PoC
- MVP/software architecture design.
- Advise on advanced techs (AI, ML, etc.).
- Security and compliance planning.
- Detailed implementation roadmap.
- Communication with vendors, RFP, continuous project quality management.
End-to-end software development
- Product idea conceptualization and feature management.
- Software UX and UI design.
- MVP/software development in compliance with industry standards and regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FIPS, COPPA, etc.).
- Testing and QA.
- Integrations with third-party systems.
- MVP/software launch and support.
Why Choose Loginet to Deliver Your Software Product?
- Full-service software development company.
- 700+ experts onboard, including project managers, business analysts, architects, developers, data scientists, QA, security, DevOps, and support engineers.
- Over 3,300 success stories (including projects for Viber, eBay, MTV).
- 4.8 rating on Clutch.com.
- Mature quality management, backed by ISO 9001.
- Robust data security management, supported by ISO 27001.
- Competencies in advanced techs like IoT, big data, AI/ML, AR/VR, blockchain, image analysis, etc.
- Expertise in 30+ industries, including healthcare, banking, manufacturing, marketing, etc.
- Loginet Australia Corporation is listed among The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2022 by Financial Times.
Benefits of Software Development with Loginet
Minimum time to market
Code-based MVP will be ready for users in ~ 2-6 months, which allows you to roll out your product fast and stay ahead of the competition.
Fast releases
With Agile development, CI/CD pipeline, DevOps approach, and a balanced mix of manual and automated testing, our teams deploy major releases every 2-3 weeks.
Optimal development costs
The usage of scalable cloud-native architectures, ready-made components (frameworks, platforms, and services), and public APIs allows us to reduce software development efforts and costs.
Access to advanced techs
We can enrich your software product with AI, VR, data science, IoT, and more.
Strong data security
Loginet starts cooperation with signing NDA (already at the initial negotiation stage if needed) to guarantee the confidentiality of your information. We ScienceSoft create a protected environment (including DevSecOps practices and tools) for data processing and storage. Our security practices are approved by the ISO 27001 certificate.
Compliance
Our solutions are fully compliant with industry and legal requirements (HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, etc.).
Key Roles in Our Software Dev Teams
Project Manager
- Creating a project plan with milestones and deliverables.
- Keeping the project on schedule and within the scope and budget.
- Facilitating and coordinating communication between all team members.
- Creating a risk management plan.
Business Analyst
- Eliciting wants and needs of future software users.
- Translating user wants and needs into functional and non-functional software requirements.
UX designer (focuses on usability)
- Performing UX research.
- Performing UX research.
- Designing the information architecture.
- Conducting usability testing.
UI designer (focuses on aesthetics)
- Creating the style of user-facing software interfaces
- Creating a UI kit for user interface development.
Back-end developer
- Writing back-end code and APIs.
- Performing unit tests.
Front-end developer
- Creating a software representation level: everything that the user sees on the screen.
Quality assurance engineer
- Designing a test strategy and plan.
- Selecting test tools.
- Designing, developing, and maintaining tests.
- Implementing, documenting, and improving the testing process
- Tracking test results, finding and reporting bugs.
Back-end developer
- Managing software servers.
- Incorporating an infrastructure-as-code approach.
- Software containerization and container orchestration.
- Establishing CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment.
- Selecting and configuring tools to execute daily software monitoring.
Sourcing Models for Software Product Development
Flexible cooperation models
Accelerate through Digital Innovation with Loginet
Being truly goal-oriented, we can lead your business through a full transformative strategy with your ambitious professional goals in mind. Our expertise helps us perform well in large-scale project:
- We are in IT since 1989 and have gained vast experience in all key business processes due to decades of consulting and development of diverse software solutions.
- We have Fortune 500 companies among clients, so we are used to working with enterprises of a large scale – billions of revenue, thousands of employees.
- We get more than half of revenue from long-term engagements – we are seriously committed to create maximum value for our clients.
- We foster a value-oriented approach to digital transformation projects. Our approach has been highly praised by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP). ScienceSoft is featured in their Global Outsourcing 100 listing.
Software Development Costs
Major cost factors:
- Application type (web, mobile, desktop); number of platforms and OS versions supported.
- The number and complexity of application features.
- The number of user roles.
- The complexity of the application logic and workflows.
- The number and complexity of integrations with third-party systems.
- Application availability, performance, security, latent capacity and scalability requirements.
- Frequency of application updates and improvements.
- Special features required (e.g.,ML-based).
- Uniqueness and complexity of the UI design.
Preliminary costs
Preliminary costs
Software product MVP development.
~ $200,000+
Full-scale software product development from scratch.
How much will your software dev cost?
Loginet can help you estimate software development project costs and advise on the ways to optimize your software product development initiative.
Core Techs and Architecture Patterns Loginet Uses
At Loginet, we use cloud development and infrastructure services to deliver the majority of modern software products. Quality managed services, the pay-as-you-go model, and multiple ready-to-use components (messaging, service discovery, AI, AR/VR, IoT, data science, and more) offered by cloud providers can help create software faster and optimize its cost .
Andy Lipnitski, an IT Director at ScienceSoft, shares his view on an MSP role:
“An MSP is not just a team who manages your daily IT operations, though it’s already a huge workload off your shoulders. What’s more, a good managed IT service provider is your strategic partner and can significantly optimize the cost and efficiency of your IT by driving small and large changes, like improving network latency or embracing demand-driven cloud computing.”
