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Aggregator App Development Costs

01.11.2021 Daria Mickiewicz
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Aggregator App Development Costs

People worldwide use aggregators almost daily: Flipboard for news feeds, Spotify for music, Uber for rideshare services, and so on.

Creating an aggregator app is a great way to grow your customer base and enhance your business. You can use an aggregator app to start generating extra traffic or even leads for your business—or sell these leads to other companies mentioned on your aggregator.

But how much does it cost to develop an aggregator app? This issue is on the minds of many of our clients. The cost depends on many factors, but the most essential are the complexity and type of the app. The price of developing an app may be significantly different depending on its complexity. For example, developing an MVP aggregator app can cost between $30,000 and $40,000, whereas developing an advanced app can cost over $150,000.

In this article, we’ll outline what these figures are based on. But first, let’s discuss what an aggregator app is and how it can be used for your business.

What Is an Aggregator App, and How Does It Work?

An aggregator app gathers together particular goods or services offered by several competing providers and sells them on one platform. Some of the most well-known examples of aggregator apps include Uber, Ola, and Airbnb.

Typically, aggregators don’t own any manufacturing units or warehouses. Instead, they allow users to search for a product, service, or other information in one place using convenient filters based on various criteria. For example, if you want to read the latest news from several sources to compare information, you can open the Flipboard app and access articles on a topic from many sources at once, rather than opening many news sites or apps.

In a nutshell, aggregator apps work as follows. First, the aggregator contacts the provider and offers a partnership plan. The provider and aggregator then sign a contract and become partners. In this way, the aggregator builds an effective partnership network.

Usually, an aggregator invests in a marketing strategy to empower its brand and engage new users. Partners get their customers through the aggregator’s platform and pay the aggregator a commission.

But note that an aggregator’s partners will never become its employees; they’ll continue to be the owners, but sign a contract with the aggregator.

Reasons to Build an Aggregator App

No Competitors in Your Niche

It’s normal to have competitors, even when you’re in a niche industry. If you have no competition, this can mean you had the idea of the century before anyone else or that no one else has yet thought about it. But be careful—sometimes a lack of competition signals that there’s no business, either. It could also mean that the idea has already been tried but did not work for some reason.

For example, Amazon started out selling specialized niche products. In the first two years after its launch, the company sold books. Next, CDs and video products were added, followed after some time by electronics, video games, furniture, clothing, and foodstuffs. In this way, Amazon became a monopolist in vertical and then horizontal markets.

Good Revenue Without Huge Costs

Aggregator apps don’t need to spend much on advertising, copywriters, editors, and other staff. This type of app takes content from other, original sources. As a result, the only cost the app’s owner needs to consider is the implementation of the aggregation technology.

This means that aggregator apps can make a fine profit. For example, the food delivery aggregator Zomato had revenues of $266.47 million in 2021; the estimated annual revenue of news aggregator Feedly is currently $5.2 million; and the annual revenue of rideshare aggregator Uber was $11.5 billion in 2020.

Empowerment if You Already Have a Web Aggregator

As businesses grow, the need to make a mobile app becomes ever more evident. This hybrid strategy will help you understand how to maximize your reach and convert your users. For example, Alibaba has both an app and a website; the company places less importance on where a user comes from as long as the user does come to the platform and convert.

Decreased Competition Once Established

As an aggregator app creates a network and invests extensive effort in brand building, it does not promise overnight success. But once you have established a buyer–seller base and improved brand awareness, it will not be easy for a startup to surpass you.

Valuable Data

Companies can use data to improve customer experience, reduce costs, find new clients, and much more. Aggregator owners can turn data into revenue: they can sell data or use it to improve a marketing campaign and boost product sales.

Self-Sustaining Network

It might be tricky to establish an initial buyer-seller network. But once your aggregator application starts to generate consistent consumer footfall, it’s easy for you to attract new providers and grow your brand value. With each new consumer and partner, your aggregator business gets a new value unit.

Enormous Growth Potential

If your app solves a crucial challenge for a wide consumer base, it’s likely to grow rapidly. For instance, the trending “Uber model” has been readily accepted by many consumers, as it solved their common issue of needing to book a vehicle on demand. With a vast customer base and regular profit commissions, an aggregator app can offer you great profits.

Aggregator App Development Cost

Now, let’s consider how much it will cost to develop an aggregator app. The cost of making a mobile app can be affected by geographic location, app complexity, and local market conditions. Depending on these factors, the cost of building an aggregator app can range from $25,000 to $250,000.

Below are some average development cost estimates for the most popular types of aggregator apps.

Food Delivery Aggregator App Development Cost

Food aggregator apps allow users to order their favorite dishes from different restaurants by accessing a single portal. The food delivery app owner only provides order processing: the restaurant remains responsible for cooking and delivery. Examples of food delivery startups working under this model include Just Eat, Hero, Grubhub, and Foodpanda.

The cost of developing a food aggregator app depends on the features you want to include. The more complex the app, the higher the cost will be. For example, the cost of developing a food delivery app can range from $150,000 for a basic application with limited features to between $250,000 and $350,000 for a multi-platform app with advanced features.

News Aggregator App Development Cost

News aggregator apps collect news from all over the Internet and offer it to readers in a neatly organized manner. Newsfeed apps differ from magazine apps in terms of their information-gathering technologies. Employees of an online magazine research topics, write articles, and post them to the platform. An example of a project belonging to this category is Flipboard.

With news aggregators, there are two main options: crawlers and API integration. Crawlers are bots for web scraping that gather information from all around the web to bring it to your app. Do note, however, that some forms of scraping are still illegal. API integration allows you to seamlessly pull a newsfeed into your aggregator app. This option is legal.

The cost of developing a basic news aggregator app ranges from $40,000 to $60,000. A medium-complexity news app costs between $61,000 and $120,000. If you’d like a more precise estimated cost for building your news aggregator app, contact us for an estimate.

Online Shopping Aggregator App Development Cost

E-commerce aggregators, ranging from small local operations like GrabOne to global giants Amazon and Alibaba, have become an integral part of our lives. These companies gather and organize data about goods and services provided by third-party suppliers, displaying price and rating comparisons.

But how much does it cost to create an e-commerce app? Generally, the development cost for an e-commerce aggregator application ranges from $30,000 to $50,000. Depending on the number of additional features and the complexity of the app, this cost can increase to $80,000.

Real Estate Aggregator Development Cost

A real estate aggregator is a mobile app that collects and displays information related to all popular property platforms. You can get your data from one of the most common sources: your client database or MLS. You can also get your listings from sources like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, which offer APIs to power your app.

Your visitor should have a smooth and seamless experience when searching for a property on your real estate aggregator app, regardless of your data source. A simple app for an individual or a startup will cost between $20,000 and $25,000. Custom app development for a mid-sized real estate business will cost around $50,000. If you are thinking of creating a large app with a lot of functions, the price will start between $60,000 and $80,000.

Taxi Aggregator App Development Cost

Rideshare aggregators build partnership networks and let partners work under existing brands rather than building and developing their own offerings. In a nutshell, passengers generate the demand, drivers supply the demand, and the rideshare aggregator acts as the marketplace to make this all happen seamlessly on a mobile platform.

For example, Uber doesn’t own any cars. Rather, it aggregates or collects drivers, who drive their own cars but work under the Uber brand name. While the actual service is provided by Uber’s partners, Uber makes sure that the service standards are met: the cars reach their destination on time, are clean, take the right route, and ensure the safety of the customer. Developing a service like Uber will cost around $60,000 to $100,000.

Hotel Aggregator App Development Cost

Hotel aggregator apps are connected to various online hotel booking services. These apps allow users to compare prices and book the best hotel rooms through the aggregator app. The aggregator can also redirect users to the website of the chosen booking platform.

For each booked room, the aggregator charges a commission from the hotel owner. In addition, if hotels want their rooms to appear higher in the search results, they may have to pay an additional fee. Trivago is one of the most notable hotel aggregator apps.

If you want to create a hotel booking aggregator app from scratch, it will take over 2,600 hours. The estimated minimum price of such a project ranges from $67,000 to $115,000.

Please note, that these estimates are approximate figures for making a mobile app. The final price cannot be accurately determined without specifications.

What Influences the Cost of Aggregator App Development?

The cost of aggregator app development doesn’t only depend on development time and hourly rates: it also hinges on the following factors:

  • App development team. Depending on the project requirements, an outsourced or in-house development team can be basic or extended. An app development team typically includes a business analyst, a solution architect, software developers, a project manager, a QA specialist, and a UI/UX designer.
  • Technical complexity. Millions of features can add technical complexity to a project. Some common examples of technically complex elements include back-end development, third-party integrations, and hardware components.
  • Supported platforms and operating systems. When developing an iOS app, you should make sure that it supports both the latest and previous versions of iOS. For Android apps, the number of devices is much greater. Ensuring support for more devices also means spending more time adapting the application for various screen sizes, resolutions, and hardware specifications.
  • Custom design. Custom user interfaces are rather complex to implement, so their cost will be higher than the cost of an interface built from standard components or without a design at all.
  • Post-release expenses. Any app needs updates, customer support, back-end server maintenance, cloud hosting, and possibly legal support—not to mention application marketing and promotion, which have a huge impact on the product’s success.

Ready to Start Your Own Aggregator Business?

Aggregator apps are a vast and still underexplored niche of online services. For instance, there is a lot of space for local aggregators. If you spot any gap in needs and people are desperate for a solution—congratulations, you won! This could be a starting point for your business. If nothing comes to mind now, you can choose any niche and research the existing goods or service providers in that space so you can find out how to provide a new aggregator app in this niche and attract customers.

If you already run a business, developing an aggregator app can facilitate your business growth and scale. It will help you promote your services to a broader audience and open some new monetization options.

Do you have an idea for creating an aggregator app for your business? If so, feel free to share your thoughts with us. Our expert team will get back to you within one business day for a free consultation to discuss your next steps.

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One response to “Aggregator App Development Costs”

  1. Robert says:

    Reply

    Hello, thanks for digging deeper into the topic of aggregator apps, your article helped me to finally make up my mind. I have an idea of such kind of an application and I believe that it will be really useful for people, but I can’t really see clearly how should I move ahead with the development process. Maybe you could help me with this issue?

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