The benefits of running an app marketplace are clear: larger product functionalities create higher customer (and partner) retention, attract new customers and lead to additional revenues. But creating a thriving ecosystem and a successful app marketplace to showcase it is not straightforward. 

When you decide it is the right time to start building your app marketplace, you should first weigh the pros and cons of building in-house v. using a Marketplace as a service solution. Here’s a breakdown of the costs and risks to consider before making your decision. 

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Actual cost of building an app marketplace in-house

Let’s consider you have an average team of 3 full-time engineers to dedicate to the project, with an average salary cost of €80,000 per year for each. And if you don’t have a team yet, you can add 6 to 9 months at best to the project. 

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That’s assuming you get this straight from the start. Once shipped, it is likely that your v1 will miss basic features making it painful to operate. From my own experience, many app marketplaces require a complete rewrite of the v.1… and 50% product teams do not get the budget to ship the v2. 

Once all set, you’ll need to unlock additional developers’ time to manage maintenance and make constant platform improvements. They will also be flooded with reports and analytics requests from administrators. But development tasks for core product features will keep piling up. So it is likely that you’ll lose engineering teams buy-in into the project. And the app marketplace project is likely to end up in the trash…

Building is a high investment, for a high risk with very uncertain payoff. You can’t afford to make mistakes. You need to get it right.

That’s why, with Heedjy, we commoditized the playbook to succeed. Discover how we can help you cut time-to-market to almost zero and save precious developers time to build your app marketplace.