If your company has made the decision to have a custom app developed and you’re meeting with app developers, the budget question is sure to come up. Yes, we are going to ask, and that’s a good thing.
Let’s call a spade a spade. It might seem suspicious to be asked, like we’ll increase our price if your budget is more than the actual cost…but that’s not how we work. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that your budget is remarkably more than necessary anyway.
Or, maybe you’re just beginning to look around, and don’t have a budget yet. Fair enough; but even then you have some number or range in mind. We’ll call it your expected cost range. Like when you go to the store to buy a gallon of milk and expect it to cost $2.50 to $3.50. That’s what we want to discuss.
Here are the two reasons why we ask for your budget (or expected cost range):
1. To Confirm Fit
Sometimes buyers who have never purchased custom software have an exceptionally low expectation of the cost. Custom software is not cheap to build, or maintain. To ensure it’s a good fit, we discuss cost ranges upfront, before spending days (or weeks) talking about everything else.
2. To Suggest the Right Solution
Knowing your needed feature set will give us an idea of whether your app will be on the low, mid, or high level of the price scale. But knowing your budget helps us guide you in the right direction.
What I mean by that is if your needs point to mid level, but your budget points to low level, we’ll make suggestions to keep your costs lower. Such as leaving less necessary features to a future version, developing a hybrid app (if appropriate) instead of two separate native apps, and so on.
If your needs are aligned with your budget we won’t waste time trying to reduce the scope (feature set) without good reason. In fact, you’d probably find that aggravating.
That’s about the extent of it. We’re here to help and guide you in this process. So, let’s pull the cards out from hiding and have a business-minded conversation about your needs, and how we can help. And if it’s not a good fit, we won’t waste your time. That’s a promise.
