Somebody in your business has said "we should have an app". Maybe a competitor launched one. Maybe a customer asked. Either way, you are now pricing it up, and the quotes are all over the place.
Before you spend anything, it is worth knowing that we turn away a fair share of app enquiries. Not because we cannot build apps - we have two of our own live on the App Store and Google Play - but because when you ask what the app is actually for, the honest answer is often that a good website would do the same job for less money and less ongoing hassle.
Here is the test we use in discovery calls. It takes about twenty minutes and you can run it yourself.
The three questions
How often will one person actually use it?
Be honest about this one. Not how often you would like them to use it - how often they genuinely will. If your customers reach you once a month or less, an app is an expensive way to be forgotten. It will sit on their home screen unused, then get deleted in a storage cleanout. A fast website they can find when they need you serves occasional visitors far better.
Apps earn their place when use is frequent. Daily or weekly, ideally. Something a person opens as part of a routine.
Does it need to work without signal?
This is the question people skip, and it is sometimes the whole answer. We built our court manager app for badminton clubs, and the deciding factor was not features - it was that sports halls have terrible signal. The app had to run a whole club night on the organiser's phone with no connection at all, saving everything locally and syncing later.
A website cannot reliably do that. If your people work in warehouses, on building sites, on trains or anywhere else the internet disappears, that is a genuine reason to build an app.
Does it need the phone itself?
Camera, GPS, push notifications, the home screen. If the thing you are building only makes sense because it lives on a phone - scanning items, tracking a delivery route, nudging someone at the right moment - then it is an app. If it is really a set of pages and forms that happen to be viewed on a phone, it is a website.
If you answered "not really" to all three, you need a website. A good one, built properly and fast on mobile - but a website.
What people get wrong about the cost
An app is not just a more expensive website. In our experience the same functionality costs roughly half as much again to double what the equivalent web build would, and the difference is not padding. It goes on store compliance, offline behaviour, testing across a zoo of devices, and release engineering.
The bigger surprise is what happens after launch. A website you can change this afternoon. An app update goes through store review, which takes days and occasionally rejects you over a detail. Apple and Google also update their platforms every year, and a published app needs someone keeping it compatible. None of this is a reason not to build an app - but it should be priced into the decision, not discovered after it.
The middle option nobody mentions
There is a third answer that suits more businesses than either extreme: a well-built website that behaves like an app. Modern websites can be added to a phone's home screen, load instantly, and work partially offline. For a lot of "we need an app" conversations, this is the honest recommendation - most of the app experience, none of the store overhead.
It is not right for everything. It cannot match a real app for offline reliability or notifications on iPhone. But if the driver behind your app idea is mostly "we want to be on their phone", it deserves a look before you commit to the full build.
How to use this
Run the three questions with the people who actually deal with your customers, not just the people excited about the app. Write the answers down. If you land on "app", you will go into quote conversations knowing why, which makes every quote easier to judge. If you land on "website", you have just saved yourself a good deal of money and a store review process.
And if you are still not sure, ask someone who builds both and has no reason to sell you the expensive one. The right developer will tell you when you do not need them to build an app. It is in their interest too - nobody enjoys shipping something that gets deleted in three months.
Written by Graeyna
The team that designs, builds and runs the software we write about. Engineers, not marketers.