How Much Does It Cost To Market An App?

Today mobile app marketing costs consist of many important components that cover the entire lifespan of an app and can be divided into three stages – Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch. We are covering app marketing that represents the post-launch stage.
App Launch & Post Launch Costs
Once a mobile app is ready to be launched, two app marketing costs will be dominating the balance sheet – CPI, aka Cost-Per-Install and CPA, aka Cost-Per-Action. Both brands and indie app developers will need to spend big portion of their app marketing budget to acquire users for their app and even more to get them perform a specific action(s) that is expected – register an account, make an in-app purchase, subscribe to a service or make a reservation.
Despite the rise of such powerful app install platform as TikTok Ads, Facebook Ads is still number one when it comes to driving mobile app installs. In 2020 an average app install cost was $3.5 per install, which was a double of the 2019 figure because of the COVID-19 impact on the app industry.
App User Actions Cost
The other crucial app marketing cost, that is essential to measure for running an effective app marketing campaign, actually trumps Cost-Per-Install in its significance because it covers the most important aspect of an app marketing – specific action that app marketers expect mobile users to take. Getting mobile users to install is only the first step in a mobile app life cycle, for a mobile app to be profitable app marketers need to get their app users to take an action that the app suggests, such as registration, placing a reservation, making in-app purchase, buying a physical product or service, subscribing to a service on a recurrent fashion. Apart from an app install, the cheapest action achieve is registration that costs $3.6 for iOS and $2.2 for Android, the most popular monetization mechanism – in-app purchase costs marketers to achieve $77.5 on iOS and $86.7 on Android. In contrast with previous years when subscription was the most expensive action app marketers had to pay for, now it costs only $33 for iOS and $46 for Android apps. Curiously the price that app marketers pay for app users to purchase via app is almost identical to the in-app purchase one.
Push Notifications Platforms Cost One of the most effective and widely adopted mobile app marketing tools are Push Notifications platforms that allow app marketers to communicate with their apps user base to keep their loyalty and avoid them churning away, which is the awful problem they need to deal with. Depending on a number of subscribers that specific plan supports, as well as extra features and API access, the pricing for Push Notification services may lay within $30 – $250 / month.
Final Thoughts Summing up all kind of app marketing expenses mentioning above, we may come up with a figure of at least $10k that is necessary to plan an app go-to marketing strategy. Because the app industry is extremely crowded, talking about doing app marketing for free does not make any sense anymore, regardless of an industry and app’s purpose. Because the ultimate competition that app marketers are in is about people’s time and attention, it’s become paramount to allocate app marketing budget on marketing channels that are capable to deliver the message to potential app users when it’s appropriate and when they are receptive to this message. Doing otherwise would be simply wasting an app marketing budget.