How much does it cost to build a marketing app?

Standard price for a marketing app: $17,000

Find out the cost to build your own custom marketing app:

Get Estimate Now

What is a marketing app?

A marketing application is a web or mobile application that enables users to manage their company's advertising campaigns and social media channels. Marketing apps usually include dashboards for analyzing campaign performance, creating ads, and publishing content on various social media platforms.

Marketing apps and marketing automation apps are among the most popular app types around. Many of these apps share features with other business productivity apps, such as bookkeeping apps, CRM apps, project management apps, and budgeting apps. Some popular marketing applications include MailChimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Buffer.

Here are some recent marketing app examples built with Crowdbotics:

  • A "social media marketing marketplace" app that sells social media services and marketing consulting through a centralized platform. The app would also provide a more broadly applicable marketplace for users to buy and sell products and services.

  • A web app utilizing a chatbot that does the following: scours thumbtack.com for leads. Notifies the user when it finds leads.

  • A photo ranking (market research) app. Designed for Instagram influencers, facebook, really any social media platform posters. Users can upload a series of photos in a grouping and vote on which pictures they like best.

What is the typical cost to build a marketing app?

A marketing app usually costs $17,000 to build. However, the total cost can be as low as $10,000 or as high as $40,000. A marketing app with a low number of features (also known as a "minimum viable product", or MVP) will be more affordable than an app that includes all intended functionality.

For example, here are some recent marketing app price quotes from Crowdbotics:

  • $30,000

  • $10,000

  • $11,000

How long does it take to build a marketing app?

A marketing app usually takes 227 hours to build. However, a marketing app can be built in as few as 133 hours, or in as many as 533 hours. The exact timeline mostly depends on how complicated your app is. As a general rule, it will take longer if you require highly custom designs, niche features, or non-standard release platforms.

For example, the most recent marketing apps built with Crowdbotics received the following hourly estimates:

  • 533

  • 133

  • A photo ranking (market research) app. Designed for Instagram influencers, facebook, really any social media platform posters. Users can upload a series of photos in a grouping and vote on which pictures they like best.

How to successfully grow your marketing application

A marketing app must create incentives for users to share the app with their friends. An educational marketing app should provide a high level of value for new users while providing an opportunity for existing users to monetize their knowledge. For example, QuizUp offers players the opportunity to win extra in-game currency if they answer questions accurately. It's common for education apps to have more than one revenue stream; the goal is to make money via in-app purchases and/or by selling advertising space on the platform.

Risks and challenges of building a marketing application

Marketing apps face the risk of intellectual property infringement (i.e. privacy and confidentiality violations) if they store sensitive data or images without permission. They also face the risk of personal injury if a user’s phone is hacked and the app is used as a conduit for spam, malware or phishing attacks. Marketing apps should take strong security measures to prevent unauthorized access to their data stores, and they should provide users with easy mechanisms for reporting abuse.

Want a more detailed estimate?

Get a feature-by-feature breakdown with our cost estimate calculator.

Browse our full library of app cost quotes.

Find pricing info for all other industry-specific apps here.

Some of the descriptions on this page were completed with AI assistance. Learn more here.