Ever since the digital era, the fitness app development industry has gone through a digital transformation in the way people achieve their fitness goals. By making fitness easily accessible to everyone, it has made ‘health is wealth’ quite literally inclusive to all! But, how much does fitness app development cost? Let’s find out!
You would be fascinated to know that the vast majority (92%) of smartwatch users mostly use them to achieve their health and fitness goals. Among those many users, 88% say that their smartwatch has helped them achieve a fitness goal.
Health and fitness apps have boomed in the industry ever since they have become mainstream. The global fitness app market size is estimated to reach $13 billion by the end of 2025. With more and more people growing fond of these fitness apps, fitness app development has made a huge mark.
Taking up unique and innovative approaches, fitness app development is now cultivating healthier diet plans, different weight loss exercises, personal training guides, etc. all at one tap of your fingers.
If you are going through these lines, you probably are also keen on knowing the cost of developing a fitness app or how you can build your own fitness app. This blog will help you find all the answers to questions like how much does it cost to create a fitness app or how much does fitness app development cost.
Although, fitness app development cost varies depending on various factors be its design complexity, development hours, testing processes, etc. Before you make any decisions, this guide will walk you through all the details you need to know!
Before we head directly into knowing how to create a fitness app, it is of utmost importance to determine what type of fitness app development is apt for your business. Here are some of the mainstream types of fitness app development.
Types of Fitness App Development
There are various types of fitness apps that have entered the health and fitness market. It may seem that all of these apps are geared toward learning how to work out but there are so much more fitness app development offers:
With the increase in demand for fitness app development, there are fitness apps for every activity related to health and fitness to fulfill user’s needs:
Fitness Coaching
Users need to be coached about the workout plans that are appropriate for their body types, what exercising techniques should they capitalize on, know about their balanced meal plans, etc. A personal coach that provides personalized coaching with a user-specific approach can help them achieve their fitness goals.
Workout Apps
Workout apps help users track their personal workout routine and also help them pick up exercises on their own. It helps users keep track of their fitness journey by providing vital information such as calories burned, calorie intake, muscle build-up, which muscle area is activated, etc. You can also create a fitness app that can track more data through third-party API integration or smart devices.
Diet and Nutrition Apps
These fitness apps help users to stick to their diet plans and maintain their nutrition intake. Users can log in to the consumption of food during the day and understand what microelements are included and the calorie intake it leads to.
Fitness Tracker Apps
This app tracks the user’s activities throughout the day such number of steps walked, cycling, jogging, or running distance, calories burned, fitness regime, etc. These apps can also memorize the route you take.
Yoga and Meditation Apps
These fitness apps provide tutorials, images, videos, and audio, on how to perform different yoga postures correctly. If you want to make a fitness app, you can either focus on specific asanas or have a combination of different exercise routines like many other apps do.
Assess the Cost of Developing a Fitness App – Build an MVP!
Always remember the cost of developing a fitness app will always rely on various aspects such as the features of the fitness app, UI/UX design, quality assurance testing, DevOps services, etc.
There are many other factors that affect the cost of developing a fitness app:
- Features & their complexities
- Platform – iOS, Android, Web
- Design
- Testing
- Team location
- DevOps
- Tech stack
It is the thumb of the rule to launch an MVP of an app to get the feedback of users before actually investing money in your idea. After launching an MVP, you can test which of your features are more attractive to your users and what type of advanced features can you include.
MVP helps you show something more tangible to the investors who are overloaded with different pitches and therefore increase your chance of getting investments.
To assess how much does it cost to create a fitness app, you will have to add all of the hours required for all of the development processes such as the back-end work, mobile app development (iOS or Android), QA testing, DevOps, UI/UX design, etc.
After which you can multiply by the team’s hourly rate and get a fair estimate of the cost of developing a fitness app. The project fitness app development cost may be subject to change with the project size and requirements.
Below you can find an approximate time and cost to develop a basic fitness app. To calculate an accurate price, we need to know the project requirements.
So, to create a fitness app, you need at least $94,350 for one platform (iOS or Android) and $154,750 for two platforms (based on a $35/h rate).
How to Create a Fitness App – Feature Checklist
Users prefer apps that have feature-rich components and are highly responsive. The more features, the better the app will perform as it will offer a variety of functionality.
Also, the more complicated the features are, the more time it will to create a fitness app.
Investing in increasing the functionalities of your app is highly rewarding in the long term. Here’s a feature checklist for your fitness app development:
Feature Checklist to Create a Fitness App
The features can vary as per the type of fitness app you are developing. Each fitness app will serve a different purpose and would offer unique features for its users. Here are some of the basic features to build a fitness app:
Sign Up and Login
Ideally, every app should offer several login options to make this redundant process of registration quick and effortless for users. This feature allows them to create their personal account or log in through their social media account. Giving them the option to log in through their emails or their phone number and password gives users a convenient choice.
Make sure that you provide them with a ‘Forgot Password’ option because no password recovery means that users will bounce off the app as quickly as they visited.
List of Workout Plans
Your workout plans include as many fun exercises, warm-ups, yoga, meditation, and training sessions as you can. This list of exercises with a video playbook can help users understand the technique. At the end of the workout, users can also see the calories burned or the muscles activated.
Nutrition Plans
Users will need information on the list of meal plans and food intake they have during the day. These ideas should be ready-made with the list of groceries required so that users can prepare their meals accordingly.
Customized Fitness Plans
Trainers will be able to provide their clients with customized fitness plans that are tailor-made for specific clients based on their weight, lifestyle, body types, health, etc. that are unique to each individual.
Fitness Activity Tracking
The app needs to provide users with real-time tracking, expert assistance, and data-driven solutions to your users. The calorie counter helps them gain a better understanding of their diets and health journey.
User Profile
For registration and account creation, users will have to use their email, Facebook, or OTP via mobile number. After this, the user can enter personal information such as weight, height, age, sex, fitness goals, etc.
Push Notification
You should send push notifications to users to remind them about the scheduled workouts. It’s also important to remind users to log their meals or drink water.
Subscriptions
To build a higher engagement and retention model for your app, the user can subscribe to the plans and newsletters to get better health and fitness insights. Depending on the monetization strategy, your users may want to buy workouts and fitness plans on a subscription basis.
Wearable Integration
Users will be able to find relevant information and fitness centers around the location through our geolocation-enabled applications.
Payment Gateway Integration
Your users can make payments through different payment methods such as online payment processing, cards, wallet, etc. Developers use Braintree, PayPal, Stripe, and other payment gateways to make online purchases work.
Social Media Integration
Your fitness app can also focus on leveraging social media channels to provide better branding and marketing to your fitness app. This offers users a better way to make use of social media to highlight their progress and will also boost the visibility of your app by drawing engagement.
E-commerce Option
Your fitness app development must provide a wide variety of built-in features and customization options as the e-Commerce platform appeal to users for purchasing fitness products.
Gamification
One of the best ways to avoid users leaving your app is gamification. Gamification can make it interesting for users to achieve their personal fitness goals. You can use it to make your users keep using your app for offers, rewards, badges, etc.
How to Create a Fitness App? – Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1. Do Market Research and Draw up a List of Features
Before you start to build a fitness app, the most important part of how to create a fitness app is to know the market and study your target audience. These initial stages of research determine the success of your app.
Gather as much information as you can about your customer needs and expectations while keeping in mind the industry trends. You can create a list of the required features before setting up a team.
Step 2. Hire a Qualified Development Team
There are always two options that entrepreneurs and business owners face, it is whether they should look for a reliable outsourcing company or should they hire an in-house team of expert developers!
However, if you want your product to go live soon, building an in-house team of developers is going to drain your energy by demanding higher costs and hiring time. Setting up your own in-house team can only be profitable in a few instances.
However, this is always more expensive as compared to hiring an outsourcing fitness app development company. Now outsourcing involves affordable hourly rates, expert developers, focused project management, and high-quality development, it has become a trend.
You can easily build your own fitness app by hiring an outsourcing development team for your fitness app development project.
Step 3. Conduct a Discovery Phase
During the discovery phase, you and the app development team you hire analyze the requirements of the project and start with the necessary documentation of the process of fitness app development.
The team will do a thorough requirement analysis, outline the features, business goals, target audience, and monetization strategy, develop wireframes, allocate resources, and design, develop, and QA test the fitness app. Followed by the estimation of the final deliverable timeline and costs.
Step 4. Develop a Fitness App
Post UI/UX, you can divide the fitness app development into sprints. Start with the development process along with testing the unit & individual functionality of your app.
It is important to have a dedicated project manager to supervise the process of fitness app development. This can assure that the development process runs smoothly starting from the requirement analysis, user journey mapping, UI/UX design, front-end, and back-end development, and quality testing till the final stage of the deployment of your application, and IT support.
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