Hi there! I’m wondering how other developers are selling Adalo based apps.
I have a potential website/app client and I’m unsure how to charge them. I know how to charge for a website (IE: design/development time + hosting etc), but how do you go about charging for an app that I will have to maintain my Adalo membership to allow to keep running?
I’m very new to the app development part and am thinking that I would have to charge a subscription fee myself for the ongoing usage of the app yes?
I began by building apps in my account and charging a monthly fee to cover maintenance costs. Now I have clients open their own Adalo account, begin an app, and add me as a co-author. This way the Adalo costs are theirs and I just charge my per hour rate.
@loneguy that’s a pretty good idea actually! I just have one potential job for an app right now and was thinking that if I wanted to make a profit (but not charge my one client out the nose monthly), I would have to find more clients which would be the best scenario but finding clients is also the tough thing in a small town.
So how do native app builders do it? I know they charge way more money (understandably so) but you’re still going to need that back end component that is ongoing depending upon the app you’re building.
I also spend most of my time working as an Adalo expert. I have found faithful and honest clients from the platform, I have a clients that i have been working with for almost 2 years now. Most of my clients kind of already understand that Adalo is subscription based even before getting to me and are ready to pay and add me to be their app author.
I believe Adalo offers an easy means of managing data and hosting. The platform also eases the hustle of publishing apps.
Its always best to outline what the platform has to offer to clients before getting started
For us (Flywheel Studio) it really depends on the client. Here are just a few examples of how we’ve worked in the past:
Most common model is a client hires us a for a fixed rate (we price the project out in advance). When it’s complete, we’ll transfer the project to their paid adalo account and help them publish to the app stores.
We also work on retainer with clients. We have a monthly minimum and we do continuous improvement, develop new features, fix bugs, etc.
We have several templates we sell. This is really where you can make a profit but aren’t charging clients a ridiculous amount.
In terms of “how to charge clients”, I think everyone agrees you should charge for value, not for time. That said, value is hard to calculate and typically its time is the easiest quantifier. We like to do fixed price for MVPs, that way it’s a bit of both. Then we do variable pricing for the future because it’s hard to calculate that in advance.
For reference, our project minimum is now $5k and our retainer minimum is $2k. We’re definitely on the higher (maybe highest?) end of the cost scale.
I am busiest with building internal business apps with Appsheet. As a solo freelancer I charge $1000 to build a pre-defined MVP. After that it is usually $50/hr to continue work with the client on adding upgrades and maintenance. I currently have 3 long term clients at that rate.
I initially found clients on Upwork and Codemap. Now I get requests to do work from those sites and have also just joined a no-code firm that sends out client builds to submit proposals for.
Thanks for all the input folks! You have been helpful. I like the idea of having the client open their own Adalo account. That way they’re 100% responsible for the paying that monthly/annual fee and then we just charge our fee to do the work.
For Appsheet you can use a single Google Sheet or Google Drive. Google Drive even is HIPAA compliant. No need for MySQL and Google Cloud or AWS except in extremely complex database builds.
No! It’s good stuff! Like I said, Google Cloud stuff is so over my head it’s not funny. I know I need to learn that stuff if I want to develop apps but I don’t even know where to start learning it!
Our hourly rate is the same at $50.00/hour. Unfortunately, living in a small town, most of the people here find that to be outrageous but as far as I’m concerned, it’s fair.
