How Much Does It Cost to Develop an Educational Mobile App?

The overwhelming popularity of educational apps can be ascribed to several benefits these apps offer to the entire educational community, including learners, teachers, parents, and institutions.

Thanks to educational apps, learners can now access all their classes remotely. Even inside classrooms, they can use educational apps as learning tools for productivity, complex problem-solving, organizing educational content, or augmenting the learning experience.

No wonder, according to Statista, education apps now hold the 3rd most popular position among all app categories and stand just behind Game apps and Business apps. Naturally, as an ambitious developer, if you are linking for material for learning to develop a mobile app, then visiting this article on how to create an app from scratch gives you excellent knowledge on how and where to start the app development process.

But for an educational app project, you must be concerned about competition and cost. While unique app ideas and exceptional execution can address the first one, the second concern can be taken care of by planning, precise estimation, and some key cost-saving measures.

Cost Considerations for Educational Apps

When discussing the cost of developing educational apps, we must emphasize the variable factors contributing to different app development costs. The cost will be much lower for simple apps with basic features, but such apps may not offer enough value propositions for the learners.

On the other hand, when you build educational apps with advanced features and functionalities, the required skills, development hours, and corresponding costs can significantly increase, resulting in higher development costs. The development cost can further increase when you introduce futuristic features such as conversational AI or a bot capable of generating text or speech content. Similarly, augmented and virtual reality apps will also be considerably higher.

The choice of features entirely depends upon the types of educational apps you want to build. Some educational app niches are highly competitive, but these are the niches that also enjoy the most excellent attention from the audience. On the other hand, despite choosing a competitive niche, you can always bring competitive value with unique features and functionalities.

Apart from the features, the experience and expertise level of the developers and the hiring model will impact the development cost significantly. With junior and intermediate-level developers, you can save substantially cost, while developers with years of experience and the excellent command will charge higher. You will spend more on overhead costs for in-house hiring, while remote hiring or outsourcing can help you make better bargains over cost and skills.

Finally, where you are hiring developers can also significantly impact the development cost. For example, some countries and regions with the exceptional advantages of low-currency value and competitive market rates can help app projects get the best experts at a lower price on board.

Let's Figure Out Some Popular Educational App Categories

Since the type of educational app, you want to build will make the highest impact on the choice of features, required tech stack, skills, corresponding development hours, and complexity of the development, cost estimation is the first stepping stone to cross. Let's have a brief look at some of the popular educational app categories.

• Language Learning App: These apps often require speech and text-based multilingual content and rich interactions, which is a challenging category involving a high level of skills and the corresponding cost.
• E-learning Curriculum Apps: These apps focusing on distance learning curriculums on several subjects is a common app category with too many players. The trick here is to offer a unique learning experience.
• Learning Productivity Apps: Apps for organizing learning content, speeding up learning, and doing more at a given time, are top-rated. Productivity apps targeting learners offer unique opportunities to experiment with innovative features.
• Educational Game Apps: Educational games can be extremely attention-grabbing and popular when you can bring a unique experience to the table. Offering interactive content with gamified experience is key here.
• Preschool Apps: These apps allow toddlers and little minds to learn interactively, and they are growing in popularity. Development capabilities based upon cognitive science to engage small children are key here.

Assessing the Cost of Educational Apps Based on Features

Now that you have decided on the type of educational app you want to build, you need to choose the must-have features for the app. These must-haves or basic features may not incur a big development cost. But you also need to consider some valuable or futuristic features to make the app stand out from the competition.

Let’s quickly brief the must-have features of most educational apps.

• Search function with multilayered filters
• User registration, login, and dashboard
• Admin panel and teacher’s panel
• Push notification
• Recording of learning sessions
• Integrated productivity and note-taking tool
• Integrated payment feature  
• File sharing
• Recording live teaching sessions
• Social media integration

Advanced or Futuristic Features Involving Higher Cost

All the features mentioned above that you commonly find in any educational app do not involve huge costs. But since these features are common and basic, with them, you are less likely to make a good impression on the learners. Getting a hold of advanced features your target audience needs is important to stay competitively ahead. These features will add significantly to your development cost.

Here are some of these features that you can incorporate into educational apps.

• Augmented Reality: Some educational apps that focus on real-world interactive learning can be tremendously benefited through AR Integration.
• Virtual Reality: Educational apps that need to offer immersive learning experiences can be benefited through VR technology.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI can plan a significant role in delivering a personalized learning experience based on the cognitive capabilities of the learners.
• AI-based Content Creation: AI-powered content creation powered by Natural Language Generation (NLG) and data models like GPT-3 or Dalle-2 can take the intelligent learning experience to the next level.
• Visual Learning: Creating a visual learning experience powered by cognitive analytics is another emerging horizon for educational apps.

Over to You

So, cost of developing educational apps entirely depends upon the above considerations. It is extremely difficult to assess the development cost without considering these considerations. As a last piece of advice, keep cost considerations only after the required features, complementary skills, and quality parameters are determined.