According to the 2016 stats from Infographics, 52% of users said that
bad user experience allows less engagement with the company. It is found that mobile users are particular about user experiences, so they are more likely to switch if apps are not well designed and compatible for mobile.
When business owners decide to opt for building mobile apps, they look for a particular purpose to fulfill such as to improve business efficiency and productivity, to reduce redundant task or to increase sales. Once the objective is determined, it is time to check and validate the most suitable option of building the mobile app i.e. to buy a Ready-made App or to make an app using platforms more often termed as App Builders or App Makers. The businesses should compare the cost and benefits considering the below key points:
● Features: Whether the requirement is general or specific, out of the box need vs. business-centric needs
● Technical requirements: Does the app needs to be integrated with the existing applications or can function independently?
● Price: Which option gives a lower cost — onetime fee, subscription based charges or any other cost model?
● Time to Market: Requirement is fast and quick or can wait for app implementation
● Scalability: Need to scale up for large customer or niche customer base, or can stay as is
● Customer Engagement: Generic way for engaging or exclusive way to target the customers
As the mobile presence impacts a business right from improving internal efficiencies to targeting customers — covering all functions from finance to marketing, from analytics to research; enterprises look for various models for building an app.
The readymade solutions are more attractive options to businesses due to their affordability, loaded features, and convenience. These apps are readily developed by experts with industry standard features. Whereas, some companies prefer to create their own apps using DIY app maker platforms that provide tools to build an app without any need of coding. These apps can be customized to particular business needs and are flexible to integrate with existing systems.
So the big question is whether to Build or to Buy?
The enterprises must compare and give attention to the below parameters to make their decision to build an app using an App Maker or purchase a ready-made or on demand app solutions.
Cost
Many times the cost becomes the key deciding factor. Building an app usually involves the development, maintenance, and infrastructure cost. While using an app maker brings down the development cost significantly; it increases the continuous maintenance and performance cost, along with the costs for changes (if any) because tweaking a platform based app structure is more challenging than a custom made app. Whereas buying a ready-made app in a service or a product model reduces the cost of maintenance and infrastructure as developers maintain and upgrade it on a regular basis.
There are many hidden costs involved such as bad performance, or bad user experience can make the company lose its opportunity cost.
Features
Ready-made apps have industry standard features required for any typical business scenarios whereas one can develop custom features using an App Maker in a DIY app. However, for a regular set of features, readymade apps provide better performance compared to DIY app due to its limitations in a code-free development environment.
Time to market
Time to market normally depends on the level of customization required. Usually, white label app solutions are fastest to deploy along with the flexibility of providing as many customizations as a business would require. However, when one compares an app designed using an App Maker and an app developed from scratch, the App Maker clearly wins.
Scalability
A complete custom developed app can be designed keeping the scalability requirement in mind; whereas App Makers, with their DIY tool sets, are pre-designed considering standard scalability parameters based on industry practice have limited capability in terms of performance and scalability. The apps made using App Maker can be tweaked to make it more efficient and scalable, however,not to ignore, that requires high-end programming skills, which increases a lot of costs.
In the fast changing world, continual improvement and adapting to new technology is must to sustain in the market. Businesses run according to a particular business goal and operate within a limited budget. Choosing a right approach will help business to grow and adapt quickly. So the companies need to decide if App maker features meet their requirements or they need expand their resources to build an online marketplace solution?One should consider the total cost of ownership while making a build or buy decision.
In case you are looking for an app solution that is scalable, cost-effective, feature-rich and quick to launch, you definitely need to get in touch with us at ValueAppz. With an experience of building 350+ high-performing apps, we surely can be of help to you.
