Under the Hood: How Much Does It Cost to Make a Fitness App?

Today’s fitness app market is experiencing an immense boost — health is a priority for many users. The global home fitness market was valued at $12.8 billion in 2022 as people globally seek convenience and wellness. Its CAGR of 5.3% will allow it to progress rapidly up to 2030. Today’s users can get their hands on anything from AI-driven training apps to recovery-based rehabilitation programs. As technology advances further, the market will grow even more.
Even the best ideas have their limits, though — and how much you spend on your app can be the main factor in your success. Entrepreneurs should carefully evaluate all the potential costs of developing a fitness app to predict what features they can add to it and what they have to fall back on. Those who start making their product without a clear picture of the expenses often end up overspending or not completing the final product at all. The fitness app development cost is a complex thing: everything you want for your program takes money. The fitness industry already witnesses approximately 97,000 fitness apps being installed on smartphones and tablets. Companies trying to understand their financial potential can save money and narrow down their priorities.
Want to learn how to create a fitness app? Do you keep asking how much does it cost to develop a fitness app? This article can be your introductory guide to creating an app and seeing what building blocks require investment. 

Key Factors That Influence the Cost of a Fitness App

How much does it cost to make a fitness app? It depends. 
The price isn’t something universal — every company has its own estimations. But if you have a rough vision, you can already translate this knowledge into a budget range. We’ve got a more detailed answer about the cost of creating a fitness app below. 

App Type & Complexity

So, the broader strokes first: some programs are cheaper than others simply because of what they offer. Activity tracking apps like Google Fit connect with APIs like Google Fit SDK. Apps that target physical training and workouts like Nike Training Club offer fitness solutions and specific training schedules with an extensive video or audio content database, which is also expensive. Nutrition and diet apps (take Lifesum, for instance) will need additional expenditures on specialized nutrition plans, recipe library, and perhaps even coaching. In turn, live streaming and coaching fitness apps like Peloton need robust video streaming technology, cloud storage, and high-performance servers. To illustrate, fitness app development services that simply track one type of activity (e.g. walking) won’t be as expensive as a complex live-streaming program due to the difference in how many functions each has. 

Core Features & Functionalities

Unsurprisingly, the features of an app for fitness directly affect the price — the more you add, the further your expenses grow in turn. 
Here are the essential features that you need to add to your checklist: 

• User registration & profile. Your users want secure authentication and sign-up processes. When creating a fitness application, developers include email, social login, and biometrics (pick what you want and can do). It’ll ramp up your spending with a customizable profile with themes, avatars, or something even more complex. Registration alone can cost somewhere around $3,000, but additions to logging-in and profile management will call for even more.
• Workout or activity tracking. Very few fitness programs go without activity or workout tracking. Even diet programs often connect the walking data to recalculate daily calorie goals. What does it entail? Usually, it’ll need GPS tracking, step counting, calorie calculation, and integration with other apps. As a rule, the activity tracking feature starts from $5,000 and can expand if a startup makes it more sophisticated or creative.
• Training plans. If your fitness app is about exercising or a certain type of sport, your users will expect specific training lessons based on their body goals, calories, health, and other factors. Today, many fitness applications even add automatized analysis and AI to process users’ growth and give better fitness suggestions. Due to how many criteria this entails, it can be on the pricier side, ranging anywhere between $20,000 and $70,000.
• Progress monitoring & analytics. Users love to see how well they’re doing, which means companies usually provide detailed visuals and a long-term progress overview. To make it work, a program needs real-life data input, information about users’ body parameters, integrations with different APIs, and so on — these can vary from $15,000 to $30,000.
• Push notifications. This one’s relatively simple: custom alerts that remind users when to exercise, drink water, or eat. If a user hasn’t been visiting for a while, it can also remind them to open an app and log in information. The costs for this range from $3,000 to $7,000. 

Tech Stack & Development Approach

The choice of technologies can determine a great chunk of your budget. Remember that tech stack choice can help you with creating a top fitness app when done correctly.

• 
  Native vs. cross-platform development. Companies often hesitate about which one to choose, but each has its pros and cons. For example, native app development (like choosing Swift for iOS or Kotlin for Android) allows apps for fitness to perform faster and better, with fewer crashes. But this approach costs 30-50% more than cross-platform development (e.g. React Native). The downside? Cross-platform development sometimes has laggy functionality.
• Backend infrastructure. It varies from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on scalability and features. Adding cloud-based solutions like AWS or Google Cloud can take you as little as $500 or as much as $10,000 monthly for hosting, databases, and API requests.
• Third-party API integrations. While quite a necessary element for most programs, it can contribute to custom fitness app development expenses without startups even noticing it. But these investments are unavoidable, so try to minimize them or do what you can afford.
• UI/UX. A well-designed UI/UX is crucial for user retention, but high-end UI/UX can be painful for your wallet. While a simple design with a simple layout and standard components is priced at around $5,000, advanced motion design and custom illustrations can reach even $50,000.

Development Team & Costs

An average app development team comprises a project manager, UI/UX designer, frontend & backend developers, QA engineers, and DevOps and maintenance team. A fitness app development agency chooses whether it wants to cut on a few roles or add more depending on how difficult the project and deadline are. If you want your app to be made fast, it will increase the prices, so businesses should prioritize long-term planning instead of rapid change of pace.
It’s probably not a secret that different countries have varying pricing ranges for the completed work. North America and Western Europe are the regions with the highest cost to create a fitness app, while India and Southeast Asia have the lowest options. Many companies have specific values: for instance, some prefer to provide jobs to locals while others want to invest in developing countries. The options are numerous.
Fitness app development teams can be in-house, freelance, or outsourced. A freelance team might be cost-effective for smaller projects or the ones that don’t require much complexity. It’s not that freelancers are less skilled — they just can be unavailable on short notice and aren’t necessarily available all at once. Agencies or in-house teams are ideal for complex, long-term products, but they are more expensive as a part of the company’s core team. A third alternative, outsourcing, is getting quite popular: it gives you a team of people who know their deadlines and finish the job without requiring you to manage them. 
Important: Whatever choice you make, always consider your company’s growth and the need to keep a team for maintenance. Don’t try to save money on your team’s expertise.

Scalability

Your fitness app will grow; there’s no doubt about that. During your health and fitness app development, keep in mind the perspective of expansion to diverse audiences and more users, as it will require an entirely different technology focus. Backend infrastructure may need to support a greater number of users as your app will become more popular. A development team can prevent disruptions by using cloud hosting services (for example, AWS or Firebase), which can cost significantly if you need to store more data. Real-time features can put additional weight on your budget, requiring load balancing, caching, and database optimization investments. 
The same goes for your front-end and user experience, which relates to UI/UX design and API connections. If your app is minimalistic with few features, it can handle a larger number of people. Still, if you have a complicated app with personalization, it can crash regularly as it grows more popular. This calls for long-term planning: you should schedule new features and keep tabs on your daily user attendance rate. 

Compliance with GDPR, HIPAA

Security and privacy impact the cost of developing a fitness app, especially when it’s related to handling sensitive health-related data. Companies have to adhere to regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, and this can add an additional layer of expenditures. Your fitness app will have access to information crucial to secure, requiring data anonymization, effective authentication protocols, and encryption methods. You may need to add measures from cyber threats and how your fitness application connects with third-party APIs. Each of these improvements will affect the cost of your app, but it’s worth it since the legal consequences for data privacy breach has a monetary tag as well — and it’s usually much higher.

How to monetize fitness apps

Now, to the exciting part: How can you monetize the fitness app that you so passionately invest in? Below are the most common and practical strategies. 

• Subscription model. One of the most popular approaches to monetizing, it allows fitness startups to choose between premium and freemium alternatives. Most emphasize freemium by providing free core features and allowing users to get more for additional payment. Those who want to pursue premium should be aware that their proposition should be unique enough for users to want to pay for it — remember that many already give free training and nutrition plans for free. Offer newcomers a free trial to get a taste of what you’ve got and encourage them to purchase a subscription.
• In-app and one-time payments. This one’s not as common but still attractive — and since you build your own fitness app, you can make the rules. Instead of paying for the time of use, users can buy specific training or meal plans once and have access to them until they want to buy something else. You just need to add new, exciting content regularly.
• Advertising and sponsorships. Integrating ads can be a lucrative monetization method, but it must be implemented carefully to avoid disrupting the user experience. Try to place your ads where it will still make it possible for your audience to use the program; using sponsorships too much can annoy those opening your app and leave them frustrated.
• Crowdfunding and donations. Although few companies go with this approach, it can be an appealing opportunity for entrepreneurs with a unique idea that can encourage more people to give money to it. Patreon and Kickstarter are known for their community-based focus and an indie market. 

Why Choose SDA to Make a Fitness App?

What makes SDA a good fit for your ambitious and, no doubt, creative fitness app? 

• Strongly business-oriented approach. If you need a fitness app development company that prioritizes you, it’s time for us to connect. Our team views every company as the central force bringing the plan to life — although we help with ideas and execution, it is you who makes the final decision. We know that our clients’ ideas have the potential and heart behind them, and our task is to ensure that our fitness application development meets their needs and hidden pain points.
• Only the top tech talent hired. Our fitness app developers are the key players in creating programs, so we take great care in finding the right candidates. We have a thorough screening, review, and hiring process to ensure that every person on our team has irreplicable skills and the ability to learn and grow. SDA’s experienced software developers have mastered the latest development practices and know how to make an appealing, easy-to-use, and future-oriented technological solution.
• A smart money-saving strategy. We don’t believe that creating an app should be a financial burden for enterprises. SDA starts your fitness mobile app development after investigating the key budget limitations and expectations. A high-quality product shouldn’t be overpriced — that’s why we always look for ways to decrease your cost to develop a fitness app without sacrificing functionality.
• Prioritized transparency. Communication can make or break a business collaboration, which is why we’ve created high standards on all levels. We know that our customers value the opportunity to be involved in building a fitness app, so we conduct regular online meetings and emphasize accountability. We provide regular updates and check in with our clients on every app development stage.
• 100+ projects from scratch. We aren’t newbies in the market and have gained lots of experience handling the most complex app-creating projects. Although we want to start from the first step with every customer, our expertise empowers us and proves we’re trustworthy for potential clients. SDA values trust, and we want to bring all we’ve accumulated to suggest resource- and time-saving strategies for every new client.

Do you want to know how to develop a fitness app with our support? We’re always here to arrange a first call.

Reflecting on Building a Fitness Application

Building a fitness app from scratch isn’t a straightforward task, especially for a fitness startup — so if you’re just entering the market, assess the resources you’ve got before diving deep.  Companies starting their projects always assess the cost of developing fitness apps. Some ambitious but eager entrepreneurs can dive right into the process without careful consideration and lose both the money and a top-selling idea.
Our guide should have made it relatively easy for you to estimate some of the expenditures for your fitness app development solutions. While it’s difficult to calculate the exact number, go for a higher one just to be safe. Additional and unexpected costs aren’t uncommon, so give yourself some wiggle room as you plan your budget. It’s best to have a team figuring this out, as even the best managers can fail to see something from the outside. During your journey, you’ll likely face multiple challenges and changes in the market, which may entirely transform your plans. However, a flexible growth-oriented plan will allow you to eliminate most threats. And now, you know how to create your own fitness app with this in mind.
Need assistance with developing a fitness application since budgeting can be a bit tough? Contact us — SDA can turn your vision into a neatly made app based on your budget. We can help you bring your product to a loyal audience.