Today’s low-code and no-code development platforms enable teams of software developers—and even non-coders—to deliver, support, and extend a wide array of applications. They are used to build mobile apps, deliver customer experiences, streamline workflows, modernize legacy applications, automate data integrations, and support data visualizations, to name the more common uses.
The major selling points of low-code and no-code development tools are that they can be used successfully by lower-skilled, “citizen” developers; that they can produce apps faster than using native SDKs; and that they can produce apps for less money. Many (but not all) of the commercial low-code and no-code systems offset your savings on labor costs with their licensing fees or subscriptions.
No-code and low-code costs and savings
If you’re building consumer or customer apps, avoid development systems that charge you per-user, and avoid development systems that don’t deliver native-like performance. If the development system generates apps with slow performance or a non-native look and feel, consumers may well turn up their noses at them.
To give you a ballpark estimate, Bachelor’s-level software developers in the US make between $50K and $120K per year (average $72K), and simple consumer applications built from scratch in native code take anywhere from six to 25 man-months (average 12 man-months), so simple native applications are likely to cost about $72K to develop. Complex native apps can cost over $1 million to develop.