• My Admin
• 2 days ago

If you have a restaurant business, not building an online food delivery for restaurants app/chatbot is a mistake.
Yes, there's an investment involved.
But that doesn't need to be hefty.
Since you're running a business, you're already expending a lot on salaries, overhead costs, infrastructural expenses, rents, etc.
When you weigh both the pros and cons, you'd see that building an online food delivery bot is the smartest move during this pandemic.

Why building an online food delivery app/chatbot is the smartest move?

Before we ever talk about the cost to build a food delivery for restaurants app, it's important just to brush off a few pointers that you may have missed out.

• Generating more revenue: Generating revenue becomes often too hard for a restaurant business. Especially during this troubled time, it's difficult to attract customers for dining out. What if you find a way to attract more and more customers to your restaurant without breaking your bank? Won't you grab the opportunity?


• Saving time: To run effectively, a business needs to handle a thousand items every day. What if you can get an assistant that can do the errands, can take care of the routine, admin work, and free up enough time for you & your team to focus on the key activities? Would you not love to have someone like that around?


• Improving customer service: The businesses have become customer-centric a long ago. But the pandemic surged restaurant industry has completely revolutionized the way customers are treated. If you don't provide extraordinary customer service, you'd be soon out of business. And chatbots can help you delight your customers like never before.


• Offering personalization: Treating each customer as per their response isn't an easy task. For a human, it's an impossible task to perform. For a chatbot, this is the norm. A chatbot can offer personalized attention to all of your customers 24/7 even when you're not working.

The only con of having a chatbot may be the upfront investment that you need to make to add the required features and functions.
Now, let's talk about the cost of restaurant app development.

Factors to consider while building a food delivery app

• Since the variable factors are too many, let's start with the factors first.
  
• Think about the minimum viable product: If you've never built an app/chatbot before or you've never hired a vendor to do it for you, you should start from scratch. Make a list of functionalities or features you would like to have in your minimum viable product. Having clarity behind why you want these functionalities is the first step to begin making sense to the vendor.


• Have a list of vendors: You need to look into multiple vendors that can offer you the best price and the best features. The idea is to find the right match for you. Don't go for the cheapest vendor because you may not know what they'd deliver at the end of the day. Instead, work with each of them on a trial basis and see whether they can really deliver.


• You could also reduce your cost by hiring a technical expert: If you have a budget constraint and also have the required infrastructure where an app/chatbot can be developed, you can hire remote technical experts [insert NCRTS link] at an affordable price and can build your app/chatbot exactly as you want.

Basic features: Here are the fundamental features you should look at -

• Features from the customers' point of view: Your app/chatbot should have a user-friendly interface, easy to login feature, a user-friendly menu they can order from, a feature of adding to the cart, integration of payment, notifications, order tracking, an opportunity to rate & review, and finally excellent customer service.


• Features from the restaurant's point of view: You should have the ability to log in, receive, and manage the orders, manage the menu (adding more items or removing the ones that are not available), updating the status of the orders, etc.


• Features from the admin's point of view: You also need to create features that would support your admin. You should have the admin login, application management, restaurant management, offering discount options & gift coupons, payment management, and also technical assistance.

Cost to build a food delivery app

Finally, let's talk about the cost to build a food delivery app.

An average cost of delivery apps

When you assign a vendor for developing a food delivery app/chatbot, they'd not only work on the mobile app design, they'll also develop the app for both iOS & Android platforms.
When you think about the cost of restaurant app development, you need to consider the design, development, the after-sales service, the beta testing, and finally the course correction (if any).
The cost of delivery apps, if you want to build something like UberEats or GrubHub, would be around $30,000. But it depends on the features you choose, the functionalities you use.
$30,000 isn't the ultimate number though. Your cost can be lower or higher. The idea is to see how you can optimize the app at a minimum cost.

How would you calculate the cost of restaurant app development?

App development companies charge by the hour in most cases.

You need to take an average cost per hour for developers, i.e. $100-$200 per hour.
Now, the design & documentation process usually takes around 50 hours.
The back end and front end development would take around 300 hours.
And for the big-fixing and the testing would require around 100 hours.
It means the total hours would be required to complete the whole process of developing the app would be around 300-450 hours.
If we calculate the total cost of restaurant app development, it would be around $30,000 to $90,000.
And if we take an average, it would be $50,000-$60,000.

Conclusion

To determine the cost of delivery apps, you need to first decide what you want, and then choose the right vendor to optimize the process of development and to minimize the cost.
You also need to weigh the variable factors well to save costs and to make the best use of the resources you have at hand.