In the digital age, development projects are becoming more commonplace than ever. While building digital products can be a great way to improve your company or add value to your brand, they come at a cost of their own.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to reduce spending on your development project—and here at Band of Coders, we’re always looking for ways to save our clients money. Here are seven tips for driving down the cost of your next development project.
1. Outsource
If you want to reduce spending on your development project, our number one tip is to outsource (and we’re not just saying that because we happen to be in the developing business). Outsourcing has actually been proven to reduce costs as opposed to simply relying on your own internal team. One reason is that you don’t have to hire new employees, and you don’t have to focus on development at the expense of other tasks. You’re free to keep investing time in your company while a third party builds your product; and as a result, the product usually gets built more quickly.
2. Work remote
If there’s anything businesses have learned from the pandemic, it’s how to work remotely. Now, not only can you work from home in your pajamas, you have access to a wider talent pool because you’re not limited to local development teams. You can also cut down on operating costs by letting everyone work remotely.
3. Work agile
Agile is a methodology designed to help your team work in sync and deliver value sooner. Basically, it breaks a project up into different phases and emphasizes collaboration with constant improvement. Its benefits include fewer miscommunications, less reworking, and a shorter time to market. It also allows for changing priorities as new information comes in from iterating and testing. As a result, agile typically reduces project cost by shortening the length of the process and minimizing errors.
4. Use flexible pricing
Changing project requirements can tack extra, unexpected expenses onto a project. While this is often a common part of software development, you can at least manage the situation through a flexible pricing model. We usually recommend the time and materials approach, which uses the agile methodology and calculates pricing based on the number of hours worked. By contrast, if you set a fixed price at the beginning, you may end up losing money or needing to hire a new team if the project goes beyond the initial scope.
5. Use cloud services
Here’s some good news: the number of cloud services on the market today are making development projects much more affordable. Because most operate with scalable pricing and only charge for the resources you use, cloud services like AWS can be a great solution for companies looking to drive down costs. But to really get your money’s worth, you’ll need to make sure you’re not mismanaging any resources, and that you’re using only what you need.
6. Start with an MVP
While it’s tempting to give your product a bunch of great features right away, you’ll save more by starting with an MVP, or minimum viable product. An MVP is basically a prototype of your product that includes the bare minimum of features needed to solve you or your customers’ problem. Imagine building a fancy, many-featured product only to realize it doesn’t work, is too complicated, or doesn’t solve your problem. With an MVP, you can test out your idea before spending a bunch of time, money, and effort on it. Once you have an MVP, you can flesh out your concept further from a strong starting point. Plus, you’ll have a clearer picture of what your product needs and what it doesn’t, aka, what you can skip out on to save money.
7. Automate
Time is money, which means that if you’re trying to save a buck, automation is your best friend. By automating time-consuming tasks, you reduce the amount of time spent working on your product. Not only that, but you reduce the risk of human error—which often leads to costly problem-solving and reworking. Automated testing is a great place to start, and while it may take a while to set up, it will save you and your team a lot of time in the long run.
Giving your product a competitive edge
There you have it: 7 strategies to reduce spending on your development project. While the overall cost of your project depends largely on how complex your product needs to be, it’s entirely possible to build a successful product without going bankrupt, and following these tips will help you do exactly that.
Need help building an affordable digital product? Let's chat.
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