What are on-demand Delivery Apps?

Gone are the old days, when one had to step out to have the cuisine of their choice from their favorite restaurants. The on-demand food Delivery Apps helps the people in getting their favorite food / the food that they are craving for, delivered at their doorsteps. The app basically acts as a mediator who helps in bringing the buyers to the sellers. No matter where a customer is at or what kind of food they want to order, they can find it in one Delivery App or the other and place their order accordingly. Only a small amount is charged as service fee on every order made through the app by the service provider.

Actually the on-demand delivery business model was pioneered by Uber. From the very first time when Uber came into the market the Uber model of business has been widely accepted and taken up by most of the Delivery Apps. Obviously a lot of experiments are done by different businesses to make the model suitable for themselves. The Uber model has actually been able to successfully merge convenience with quality. The value for money quotient that the Uber model of businesses is very impressive and it is also equally easy to be used by the customers. The model actually focuses more on ease of accessibility and works by letting other businesses to hop on to the demand delivery bandwagon. Be it a food Delivery App, be it a cab hiring app or be it an app associated with entertainment, the on-demand apps are all based on a single platform and works on the same philosophy.

Why are food Delivery Apps so popular?

The use of access provided by the internet and allied technologies have spoilt us all. We all have become accustomed to search engines like Google which can solve all our queries just as the click of a few buttons. The habit of getting results within seconds, irrespective of how small or big the problem might be. We are nowadays used to instant gratifications. When it comes to ordering food or any other product for that matter, we expect the same. Especially while ordering food people tend to get very restive if it takes too much time and effort to place an order or if there are long queues.

Well that’s the main reason behind the popularity of the food Delivery Apps. They are very handy and helps in avoiding long queues at the hotels while placing orders. In fact, they provide the ease of ordering one’s favorite food from the comfort of their homes. It makes anything and everything possible at just a few clicks! No matter where the customer is or what time of the day it is or what the weather is like, the customer can get their favorite food delivered right at their doorsteps within minutes. To top it all, they even provide real-time tracking feature that allows the customers to get an exact idea about the expected time of the arrival of their orders. Off late, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic food Delivery Apps have become an essential part of all our lives, more than a luxury they have become a necessity.

How does an online Delivery App work?

The food Delivery Apps work by aggregating various kinds of products, services and a whole range of product options for purchase. The customer can get an app for every kind of service that they want or that they can think of. From hiring a taxi, to getting essential and hard to find emergency medicines delivered at the doorsteps; there is an app to do it all. The online Delivery Apps are here to serve the customers exactly what they desire. These apps also provides lots of flexibility and ease when it comes to payments. Once an order for a product or service has been placed, the dealer will get it delivered to your doorstep. Now the payment can be made in a lot of different ways. One can make the payment with cash on receiving their order or they can also pay via the various apps like Google Pay, PayTm, Apple Pay, online banking etc. the customers also have the ease of providing a service feedback just in case they want to inform the others about good or bad a dealer’s service and products are.

However, it is to be kept in mind that all of these functions / features are chargeable. In the next section. In the following section we will be trying to understand about the costs of adding the various features of a Delivery App. Having a prior knowledge of the costs can be helpful in getting a fair deal while trying to make your own Delivery App and also will be helpful in letting the restaurants take informed decisions regarding the key features that would suit their business model the most.

How much does it cost to build an Online Food Delivery App?

Now let us try and solve a very mysterious question which most of have asked a lot of time but hardly had any solution: how much does it cost to develop a personal food Delivery App? The cost of developing a food Delivery App actually depends on multiple factors such as the number and kinds of features that the app has, the developing team / company, size of the developing team i.e. the number of members, time taken to develop, MVP features, and the kind of platform chosen.

Let’s understand how the costing of a software development works:

How do software companies calculate the cost?

There are multiple ways in which the software companies calculate the cost of developing their software, but the most common method among them all is:

(Fixed hourly cost) * (Hourly effort that goes into the development of the app)

This approach is very dynamic and is dependent on multiple factors such as the country where the app is being developed, the design of the app, number of features and the total number of hours taken by the development team to complete the development of the app. For example, a company in India might charge Rs.X per hour to develop an app, whereas the same app might be developed at Rs.Y per hour in Pakistan and Rs.Z per hour in USA. To give a general perspective, an app with minimum features and minimalistic design takes a minimum of 340 hours of development, whereas a complex app might require anywhere around 1500 hours to be developed, but then how do the companies / developers calculate the per hour rate?

Following are few of the factors impacting the hourly rate charged by developers / companies:

Location :As discussed earlier the cost of development of an app varies according to the location / the country of the development. Depending on the country of development the process of working, the methods and software / hardware utilized changes and thus the variation in price.

Platforms :Apps are generally dependent on platforms. Some apps work on android, some works on Apple iOS, some work on Microsoft platform. Depending on the platforms the time taken and the effort need to make an app varies greatly. Every different platform requires different set of skills and hence the difference in the cost of development. The prices can fluctuate further depending on the type of app – native app or hybrid app that the developer is making.

Features & Design :The cost of developing an app will obviously fluctuate depending on the complexity of the apps. The more versatile and feature loaded an app is the higher is the cost of development and the simpler an app is the lower is the cost of development.

Infrastructure Cost :The infrastructure cost involves the cost of selecting the servers, database integration, database selection, major integrations with ERP and CRM. These are very essential for the app and all of these add up to the final cost of the app and hence can vary the price of developing the app.

Developing an app can thus be a very tricky affair, so before jumping into developing an app for your business, make sure you have doe your research right. Start exploring the local market, have a clear idea / blueprint of what features and design elements the app must have and be careful & realistic