If you’re thinking of developing your own app… exciting!! Probably. Honestly, there’s never been a better time to do it. Modern development tools and infrastructure have made it easier than ever to bring your idea to life. But it’s not necessarily a cakewalk, and it can easily end in tears if you’re not careful. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the positive things about developing your own app, some of the downsides, and some of the aspects that are a mixed bag.
The Good
Probably the best thing about building your own app is that, if you do it right, you are the king of your own castle. You’re not held back by limited templates or missing platform features. You can create an app that checks all of the boxes and delivers exactly the experience you’re looking for. When your requirements change or you need to pivot your business, you can change your app to meet your new goals.
It has also never been easier to build an app. Products like Expo make it possible to build and distribute a cross-platform app with much less effort than was required in days of yore. Infrastructure providers like Cloudflare enable you to add cloud components to your app with relative ease. We use these tools at Treefort, and we appreciate them very much.
The Bad
The biggest downside of building your own app is the time and expense. For something extremely simple, 1-2 months may be a realistic time-to-launch. For a complex, feature-rich app, it can often take 9 months or more. The cost of this work can range anywhere from $20k for a basic app to $500k+ for something more innovative or advanced. And all this is just your initial investment: a “finished” app is really a moving target as platforms like iOS and Android progress. Expect to continue spending significant effort to keep your app up-to-date, working smoothly, and available in the app stores.
If your app depends on any cloud components — for payments, user accounts, media streaming, etc. — then another consideration is downtime. Downtime occurs when your cloud components aren’t functioning properly and your app stops working as intended. At Treefort we’ve had downtime caused by everything from bad code to a careless backhoe driver to an owl flying into a power line. Downtime is unavoidable and costly, so the name of the game is minimizing it. This is done by building robust systems, carefully testing changes, keeping up to date with infrastructure and platform developments, maintaining reliable alerts, and ultimately being willing to get up at 2 a.m. to troubleshoot and fix urgent problems.
The Ugly
After reading that last section, you might be thinking, “He doesn’t know about AI! AI solves all of that!” We actually use AI quite heavily in our app development here at Treefort. It’s a great tool and it can definitely reduce time and cost when used appropriately. However, despite what the people trying to sell you AI say, it is not a silver bullet. If you’re not careful, then AI can actually add to the total time and expense of a project (while at the same time making it feel like the opposite is occurring). This has happened at Treefort, and we’ve seen it happen elsewhere. If you still think AI will solve all your problems, just know that the maker of the world’s best frontier coding model is willing to shell out over $300k/yr for a human app developer. AI is certainly changing the world of software development, but for all its wonders, it goes squarely in the “mixed bag” section for me.
The last topic I’ll touch on is freedom (or “anti-fragility” if you prefer). Building your own app will give you more freedom in some areas. You’ll get to decide exactly how your app looks and functions, and you can’t be de-platformed (at least not at the code level). This often comes at a cost though: you’ll have less freedom in other areas. If you’re fixing bugs, then you aren’t producing new content. If you’re managing cloud infrastructure, then you aren’t hunting down the next customer. Unless you are actually running a tech company, your self-developed app is quite likely to become an expensive distraction pulling you away from your core mission. That’s not freedom (or anti-fragility).
Where Treefort comes in
This is a business blog, so of course I’ve got to steer this post back around to the topic of Treefort. At Treefort we make apps (you probably guessed this). Actually, technically, we’ve already made the apps. We offer a drag-and-drop app editor that allows you to customize our apps and relaunch them as your own. The development work is already done for you, and we handle all future maintenance and updates. Sound expensive? It’s not. Our base plan starts at just $800/mo—a fraction of the cost of a single developer.
So what’s the rub? Our apps are specifically designed for media streaming. If you’re looking to publish and monetize any kind of media—videos, audiobooks, ebooks, music, podcasts—then we’ve absolutely got you covered. If this doesn’t fit your needs, maybe the flexibility of custom development makes sense for your business!
