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Google is plagued with only search results involving the costs of paying for another developer or 3rd party software dev company, but I want to know what the costs will be if I create, maintain, and expand my own social media app entirely by myself. I hear a lot about funding rounds being held for existing apps, but what is that money used for? I assume mostly advertising, but what are the other costs?

Are there any developers here that have made apps for themselves and know the approximate costs?

whatwhatwhat
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because is not about programming. – Selvin Jul 13 '15 at 13:41
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    I see why you vote and downvote that question @Selvin, but maybe provide also an answer where to post the question instead. Just only to be a nice part of the com. – JacksOnF1re Jul 13 '15 at 13:42
  • @Selvin I thought this site was about programming questions, a.k.a. questions before, during, and after development? Is there a specific place where I can ask this? – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 15:16
  • @whatwhatwhat to be honest no. This site is about specific programming question. Code you tried, what u want, what was the error. Nothing speculative like your question, your question is pretty bad for StackOverflow standards and I only answering it for curiosity sake, but I also vote to close the question. – Budius Jul 13 '15 at 15:24
  • Oh ok. Is there a better part of SE to ask this? Maybe Meta StackOverflow or something? – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 16:37

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the only cost required to make an app is the $25 developer fee for life to put your app on the google play store. The rounds of funding you hear about are for marketing and paying people, etc, but if you are programming and advertising yourself $25 is all you need.

Tomer Shemesh
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  • Per the answer above yours, it looks like there are also hosting costs from Google based on my apps needs. Would you agree with this? – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 17:25
  • @whatwhatwhat if you have a backend server where your data is stored you need to put that stuff somewhere. you can rent server space using amazon, google, digital ocean, etc there are hundreds of server farms you can rent from. a small server that can handle a couple hundreds users will run you about $5 dollars a month. but it will scale as your user base does. Thats only if you need a backend though which all social media apps do. – Tomer Shemesh Jul 13 '15 at 17:29
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Costs and rounding funds, let's see:

You have an android development team, an iOS development team, a backend development team, a web development team, a infrastructure engineering team, a tracking/analytics team, product team to decide features and direction for the app/product and design team to make sure it looks pretty and consistent, then you have a community and support team, and marketing and PR team.

That will probably be the basic. But then of course you need stuff that any normal company need like paper stuff, law stuff, taxes, etc.

All those teams needs to get paid, they need an office to work at, this office need to have water, electricity, computers, internet connection.

The system those teams are creating need to run on some web-service, so certainly there's a lot of money to paid the webservice provider (like Google or Amazon).

But if you really think you can do all this all by yourself, then by all means, the cost is just the $25 that Google Play charges you plus any marketing costs you might want to promote your service.

Budius
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  • Wait so do you always need to create a company behind any app you make? What is the determining factor that decides that you _must_ incorporate? – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 15:18
  • And also you really hit it on the head with "The system those team are creating need to run on some web-service...". This is the biggest part I was wondering about - if my app gets more complicated (needs more Google play services, user counts is upwards of 100,000, etc...) do I need to pay Google extra money for all the extra costs for hosting on their servers? – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 15:21
  • You said it on your own question: "social media app". That means you're planning something to at least a few hundred thousand users. Or else it is not really a "social media app". And when you grow that much, you be sure you will need a web-server to run it, that users will want to use it on web/Android/iOS, that users will complain and you will need ppl to support it, that the feature set and design have to be good or else nobody will download/user it, etc, etc. And one step at a time, it's a full company. – Budius Jul 13 '15 at 15:21
  • Yes. Google, Amazon, etc, etc. They're not hosting for free. They do it for money, lots of money. – Budius Jul 13 '15 at 15:21
  • You can find examples of games that went viral and got hundred thousands of players and it was only a 1-person company, like for example FlappyBird. But "social media app", you really can't do it all by yourself. – Budius Jul 13 '15 at 15:23
  • Ahh....there it is. So that's why I should consider an outside investor. I can do the rest myself, but hosting it will take a lot of money that I don't have. – whatwhatwhat Jul 13 '15 at 15:23
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    I'm sure you're really underestimating how much effort is necessary do to all that, but good luck. – Budius Jul 13 '15 at 15:25