How Much Does It Cost to Create an App Like Snapchat? by Alexey Porubay

10.09.2018

How to esimate Snapchat app development cost PORTFOLIO

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Contents

What's Snapchat How does Snapchat work? Snapchat features How Snapchat makes money

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO CREATE AN APP LIKE SNAPCHAT?

How much for Snapchat Total cost (infographic)

7 november 2016

 3038

 11 min

Online communication is a vital part of our everyday lives. Thanks to chat apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, or LINE it's got much easier to chat without unnecessary clicks through a social network page. A lot of popular chat apps exist, and many more of their clones are appearing. However, if you want to create your own chat app don't be afraid to give it a try, because users are always open to new oﬀers. To create your own app similar to the booming Snapchat, you need to learn what brings great success to it. In this article, we'll tell you everything you need to know about Snapchat and how much it costs to create an app like Snapchat.

How Much Does It Cost to Create an App Like Snapchat?

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What's Snapchat

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To make it clear, Snapchat is a mobile messaging app that lets people share their pictures, videos and stories. It also allows users to take photos and videos and add a caption, ﬁlters or drawings to them. Its special security system makes photos and videos self destruct a few seconds after viewing. Snapchat is now widely used among teens, but it hits new demographics every single day. Moreover, according to Bloomberg the Snapchat app is used more often than Twitter. It has more than 150 million people using the app daily. Teenagers say that they prefer visual communication to texting. This is the exact reason for Snapchat's sweeping popularity.

A bit of Snapchat history Snapchat's evolution from a regular messenger into a private messaging space is really exciting.

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Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy started Snapchat in 2011, when three main giants - Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, ruled the online space. They risked a lot launching an app similar to the hottest apps, so they needed to add something that would make their app special. And they did. The idea of self destructing pictures beat all the expectations. The new app managed to equalize the strengths of all three social network giants and create something absolutely unique.

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Just one year after Snapchat was launched, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, tried to buy the app for $3 billion. However, Spiegel turned the offer down, because he realized that he had one of the hottest apps of the time. In June 2014, Snapchat was valued at $10 billion, so their rejection of Facebook's $3 billion offer doesn't seem to be goofy anymore. After a while, Snapchat launched some great updates such as Discover and geofilters as a part of their monetization strategy. We'll get back to Snapchat's monetization a little bit later, first let's find out how everything on Snapchat works and how to use the Snapchat app.

How does Snapchat work? To understand what gives an app popularity, you need to look at it from the users' side. Let's see what Snapchat proposes to its users.

How to use Snapchat?

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If you're new to using Snapchat, you may misunderstand some of the terms. People in Snapchat use some special lingo to name some things diﬀerently from other chat apps. To avoid confusion here are some of the terms for you to learn:

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A snap is the video or picture taken in Snapchat. A story is one or a number of snaps that do not self destruct in 10 seconds, but are shown to your followers for 24 hours. A snapback is a user's response on snaps. A score is called a number of sent and received pictures and videos in chat.They are shown next to your friend's name in your contact list. Snapchatters are the people who use the Snapchat app. Here is an option that allows users to get a live video chat if they are online, or in other words "here".

Snapchat features If you want to create a Snapchat clone, you need to learn what features it provides, so you'll understand what your new app should include. Here is a small guide for Snapchat features.

Making and sharing your snaps

The main feature of Snapchat, obviously, is the ability to take and send pictures and videos that self destruct in a few seconds. Snapchat provides a big number of ﬁlters, text captions and drawings for photo/video edition. Besides, recently WhatsApp enabled an update that includes new editing and drawing options that happen to be amazingly similar to Snapchat's drawing tools. After that, the Facebook team was criticized for borrowing features from their "ghostly rival".

Lenses

Lens is the most popular Snapchat feature, after snapsharing of course, which is often a goofy animation that users can overlay on the top of their pics. There are always only seven lenses to choose from, and they are changing. The oldest one is replaced by a newer one every day.

Some crazy Snapchat's lenses

Geofilters

Geoﬁlters are similar to the originals. You can overlay a design onto a picture or video taken in the Snapchat app,

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but the diďŹ&#x20AC;erence is that they are only available in distinct locations.

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Every geofilter is unique

Learn how to use geoďŹ lters in our article: Always be orientated with the integration of geolocation into your app

Adding friends

Of course, it is a vital feature for any messenger app. Although, the Snapchat team provided new ways of adding friends. They use personalized QR codes that users can scan with their camera to start following other users. They are called Snapcodes.

Use QR codes to add your friends

Chatting

Snapchat is not only a snaps sharing app, but regular messaging is also used. Snapchat couldn't ignore the

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obsession with the stickers. So they added more than 200 stickers to their recent update.

Video and audio calls

With the update Chat 2.0 video and audio calls become available for Snapchat users. The special thing about Snapchat calls is the ability to be on a call and send pictures at the same time. Also, users can now make small videos and audio clips, or as they call them notes.

Story

A story is actually a snap broadcasted to all followers so that they can view as many times as they would like for 24 hours. Users also can see who has viewed their story too. Recent updates allows users to jump straight to their next friend's Story by only swiping left in a Story, and once a Story ďŹ nishes playing the next one from the list automatically starts. The update made consuming Story content easier for users, and Snapchat is now getting over 7 billion video views daily. In fact, Instagram launched "its" Story, which is really similar to Snapchat's. And again one more Snapchat feature was stolen.

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If you want to create an app similar to Instagram, see also our article: How Much Does It Cost to Develop an App Like Instagram?

Discover

Discover is a feature which helps ďŹ nd stories from editorial teams. It provides recent news from big companies, such as Cosmo, People, CNN, Mashable and many others.

Discover helps to follow the news

Snapcash

Recently, Snapchat launched the Snapcash addition. Snapcash allows users to send money to friends and make any payments with a debit card. It's safe enough, because the Snapchat team is in partnership with a mobile payments company. To use Snapcash users have to be at least 18 years old.

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The Snapchat team has been using some of the features to provide monetization. For example, the Discover feature described above provides paid advertising. The revenue distribution between Snapchat and their clients varies, but occasionally ads are worth ten to ﬁfteen cents per view and they are estimated to be seen 500,000 to 1,000,000 times daily.

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A short time after geofilters were launched, the Snapchat team announced that users are now allowed to purchase sponsored geofilters for snaps. McDonald's was the first to use the offer and paid for a branded geofilter that covers all its restaurants in the United States.

Learn more about app monetization from our article: How to Monetize Your App, Vol. 1

In addition, Snapchat has started ads with API and announced a launch of promotional instruments such as snap ads between Stories and expandable "Snap Ads".

How much for Snapchat If you've already decided to make an app similar to Snapchat, the ﬁrst thing that needs to be considered is the approximate cost. We say "approximate" because the cost of an app's development always depends on many factors. Here we've prepared a list of components for that make up an app's cost or its approximate estimation.

1. Team First of all, the cost of your app will depend on the mobile app development team you choose. For instance, if you choose a team from Western Europe or the US, the price per hour will range from $60 to $160. However, the most expensive variant isn't always the best one. As an example, development companies from Eastern Europe will make you the exact app you want or even better, and the payment is $30-45 per hour, which is signiﬁcantly cheaper than in the US. Also, it depends on how many people your team will consist of. The standard team must include a minimum of two developers, a designer, a project manager and a QA engineer. If you want to create a more complex app then you will need to hire more people.

2. App platform One of the ﬁrst choices to make before building an app is the type of platform. It's obvious to say that if you want your app to be widely used you need to launch your app on more than one platform, especially the most popular - iOS and Android. If we speak about Snapchat, it's available for all main platforms.

Still can't choose between iOS and Android? See our article: What Is the Best Platform For the First Launch - iOS or Android? [Infographic]

However, it's often hard to include many platforms at the start, because it requires a big budget. You can choose only one to start with and make it really good, and expand your app once you become successful.

3. Design The cost of app designing again depends on your requirements. The more complex design you want, the more hours will be needed and the higher the price will get. Let's look at the basic points in app designing and try to estimate approximate costs:

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Wireframing in app designing usually takes anywhere from 14 to 140 hours. If we take an average price of $50 per hour, we get approximate cost from $700 to $7,000.

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UI design can take from 14 to 210 hours depending on complexity. On the condition of our average price the approximate cost gets to $700-10,500. The process of UX design requires from 7 hours to 200 hours, so the cost varies from $350 to $10,000.

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Also, keep in mind that not only the complexity but a platform type can inﬂuence the cost of app designing. For instance, an iOS app design is more expensive because of its strict guidelines. But Android designing can also become tricky since it has a lot of versions.

4. Ambitions about your app We can endlessly estimate approximate prices of an app, but the most important condition is how ambitious you are about your app. If you want to create a Snapchat clone identical to all of its features, you need to prepare a big budget to spend. However, it isn't a necessary condition to create an absolutely identical clone. It's up to you to decide which features to include or ignore. Here we've prepared a list for you of estimated Snapchat features which shows how much it really costs to create an app just like Snapchat. For estimation we took an average price - $50 per hour. 1) Automatically self destructed messages (a messaging app development): Time needed: 30-40 hours Cost: $1,500 - 2,000 2) Registration: Time needed: up to 125 hours Cost: up to $6,250 3) Push notiﬁcations: Time needed: 40 hours Cost: $2,000 4) Adding friends (recognition algorithms and QR code recognition algorithms development): Time needed: from 2 hours (depending on complexity) Cost: from $100 5) Geolocation: Time needed: 32 hours Cost: $1,600 6) Uploading pictures and videos: Time needed: 76-320 hours Cost: $3,800 - 16,000 7) Video and photo customizing: Time needed: 68 hours Cost: $3,400 8) Audio and video calls: Time needed: 180-220 hours Cost: $9,000 - 11,000

Total cost Summarizing everything above, we can say that approximate cost of Snapchat clone will be $70,000. Sounds not that inspiring anymore? Yes. However, we say again that everything's up to you. It's for you to decide which feature your new app will provide and how similar to Snapchat it will be.

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Price comparison

There is no need to create a pompous app at the very beginning. Keep in mind that the real Snapchat started as a small messaging app similar to Instagram where a minimum number of features was provided. All that they had was an idea. A new and unique idea. Get your inspiration from the exciting Snapchat evolution story and give your idea a try. And then, get in touch with a reliable mobile app development company and start your project up!

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