How Much Does Restaurant App Development Cost?

The food industry with its sub-services like delivery, promotion, and retail, is on an active growth. Does the credit go to mobile apps? Let’s take a look at current food industry statistics to set this out. 

Food Industry Insights You Need to Know

• 2022 has witnessed the food industry bagging a $8.66 trillion valuation where 7.8% of the total revenue accounts for online food services via delivery apps, restaurant apps and more. 
• The online food delivery and restaurant services alone amount to $323.30 billion in 2022, expecting to show an annual growth of 7.60% from 2022 to 2027. 
• On top of these, the number of active users in the online food delivery and restaurant services are expected to reach 2,613.2 million by the year 2027. 

These are big numbers depicting the growth and opportunities digital restaurant transformation solutions such as  mobile apps for restaurants bring to a business.  Businesses have started investing in restaurant online ordering apps that have made ordering food in real-time, finding a restaurant, booking a table, or simply leaving experience reviews online easier than ever . 

A sign of this contribution can be seen in the stats that the restaurant-to-consumer delivery segment accounts for $115.30 billion in 2022. With such high numbers on stake, you’d probably want to know how do you make a restaurant app and the cost to develop a reliable restaurant app for your business. 

The restaurant app development cost ranges from $2000-8000 comprehending basic features such as Geo location, food delivery etc.  whereas a multinational food chain app development cost would be around $20,000-40,000 comprehending advance and complex features. 

However, the accurate figure depends on various factors like restaurant app features, cost of your restaurant app development company, type of restaurant app etc. 

In this article, we are going to look into the different facets of restaurant mobile ordering app development. You will discover reasons why entrepreneurs should enter the mobile app space and build a custom restaurant app, the different app categories, feature-set, factors that affect the cost of restaurant app development etc. Let’s start with the basics: 

Why Do You Need Restaurant Application Development for Your Business?

There are a number of reasons why restaurants aim to have a well-executed mobile app. Let us dive into them before moving to the nitty-gritty of restaurant mobile app solutions.

Here are the top four reasons why your business needs a restaurant mobile app:

1. Brand Awareness 

A restaurant mobile ordering app comes with a huge potential to better your restaurant’s visibility, marketing it to users, and increasing the overall footfall in your restaurant. There are multiple ways apps help you achieve high brand awareness – push notifications help with retargeting, wait time gamification helps with increasing engagement, geo-location tagging makes you popular in a particular region, etc.  

2. Increased Bookings 

With the increased need for on-demand apps, mobile applications for restaurants give you the benefit of more bookings and reservations. By making it easy for customers to find your restaurant and book tables right from within the application, a restaurant reservation app helps increase bookings to a massive extent. 

3. Greater Loyalty 

Great experience and good food are not enough to increase your loyalty count. In the restaurant business, a reward system offering customers a discount on their next order or when they refer their friend can go a long way in terms of sales count and revenue. 

4. Get Customer Feedback 

Modern-day customers are very vocal about their experiences. While they might not be comfortable talking about your food or restaurant atmosphere, until it’s severe, they will most definitely share their experience online. The review/feedback section of your restaurant application can be a great space for you to learn what your customers want or what they are looking for. 

In the app industry, it is said that the more convenient the set of features, the higher are the chances of a business earning revenue. The same rule applies to the restaurant domain as well. So let’s take a look at the must have features your restaurant app needs. 

Must-Have Features for Your Restaurant App 

The list of your must-have features depends on the specifics of your restaurant business. For instance, if your business majorly involves on-demand online delivery services , then your features must include GPS, catalog panel, menu etc. however, if it’s a restaurant food chain, you would need features like “restaurant finder”, “book a table” and “compare prices” . 

Moreover, a restaurant app acquires a set of common features mandatory for every food app. Here are they:

1. Opening Screen

This is usually the first screen that the customer visits when they open your application. It carries information around your unique offering or brand story, location details, and a peek into the cuisine that you offer in addition to testimonials from customers who have dined with you before.

2. Menu 

The next important feature of a restaurant application is the menu section. Although fairly standard, there are a few things that can make your app innovative, like an extensive search feature that can help customers choose specific dishes on the basis of taste, course, ratings, etc. Moreover, it helps to add photos of the dish and a basic description highlighting its component or USP.

3. Online Ordering 

Online ordering is one of the most common features that every restaurant app offers. You should add geolocation capabilities in the app to make it easy for the customer to pin their address and even track how far their order has reached once placed. 

4. Table Booking 

Although not mainstream, the table booking feature is also growing in popularity. You can give your customers the option to both choose a standard table or a specific table through the help of an interactive floor map – something that VR and other modern technologies in restaurants can help you with. 

5. Login via Social Media or email

When it comes to taking customers’ information, there are two stages that you can consider – one when they launch the app for the first time or second when they place an order or book a table in your restaurant. 

Although our restaurant mobile app developers advise using the second because of the timeliness factor, irrespective of which stage you go with, ensure that you are giving them the option to login via email or social media platforms. 

6. Payment Processing

One of the time-tested ways to optimize your restaurant app performance is to make the process of making payment easy and safe. You should give your users a number of payment options – debit card, credit card payment, pay at delivery, add coupons, etc. when they are at the payment stage. 

At the payment stage, it is very important for your partnered restaurant app development agency to follow the compliances of payment integration to ensure that your customers’ data is protected at all times. 

7. Push notifications 

The next in our list of must-have restaurant app features are push notifications. You should have an effective notification strategy that is timed around the key hanger hours like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While these help with retargeting, you can also add notifications when the order has been accepted by the restaurant or when it’s in transit. 

8. Ratings & Reviews

The last on our list is ratings and reviews. Whether we accept or not, customers place 80% of their food order decision on the ratings made by other users. The better the reviews the higher the chances of more people ordering from your restaurant. 

Now, when we talk about reviews it’s important to give them a delete and edit option so that they can change their review once their issue is addressed. It is also important to integrate chatbots and support systems to enhance customer experience and make your restaurant app worthy. 

[Also Read – What customers expect from your restaurant app ]

The success of these features and your restaurant app as a whole depends heavily on how real-time and informative it is. A way of ensuring that is to integrate the best-in-class APIs inside the application. Here are the ones that our restaurant app developers trust:

[Also Read – 10 must-have features for your restaurant app. ]

Now that we have looked into the technical aspects of the restaurant application, let us get to the costing part of the article – the cost to develop an app for online food ordering restaurants. 

How Much Does a Restaurant App Development Costs?

The apps developed for restaurants and  are of two types: 

The simple restaurant app with core features like menu, orders, payments, push notifications, location services etc. With a basic feature set, a simple restaurant app development cost will range from $8000- 15,000. 

On the other hand, an advanced complex restaurant app with features like pre-order meal, 3D view of restaurant, 3D menu, order tracking status etc. starts with minimum $25,000. 

Also Read: How Much Does It Cost to Build a Restaurant App like Menulog?

As for the other factors that contribute to the cost of building a restaurant app, here is a list:

• Features-set 
• Mobile app design 
• Team size 
• Location of the agency
• Platform for application deployment
• Tech stack used 
• App complexity etc.

To give you a general estimate of the time and cost, here’s a table exhibiting the restaurant app development time and cost for both Android and iOS platforms.

When we talk about the development side of restaurant online ordering apps, It is advisable for businesses to build an MVP first. It is always wise to test the waters with a working model of your app idea than jump into full-fledged restaurant app development services. This way, you get to see how people are reacting to your app – changes they want to see, features they want more of, etc. 

However, if you are convinced with your product idea, full-fledgedly developing an app for your restaurant won’t be a bad idea either.

Either way, our restaurant app development services can help you make your restaurant apps smarter. Here are a few validatory examples of the restaurant and food delivery chains we have served;

Restaurant App Development Solutions by Appinventiv

We have worked with over 15+ restaurants for the digitalization of their solutions. Some of the most notable ones are mentioned below; 

1. Dominos

Appinventiv’s refined UI/UX strategy increased Domino’s mobile app conversion rate by 23%. From conceptualization to product design,development and deployment, Appinventiv helped the company with brand maintenance and design system changes to give transformative results. 

2. KFC

Appinventiv helped KFC expand its mobile presence globally and increase the conversion rate by 28%. With a portfolio ranging across multiple online restaurant solutions, Appinventiv introduced efficient customer service and expanded the customer base using modern solutions. 

3. Pizza Hut

Appinventiv, through its transformative UI/UX strategy and intuitive development standard increased the conversion rate of Pizza Hut by 30%. Not only this, the Pizza Hut mobile app solved the screen transition time challenge to 7 seconds with the right tools and tech stack. 

How Can Appinventiv Help Your Business with Restaurant App Development?

Appinventiv is a restaurant app development company where our team of domain experts have hand-held  brands throughout the ideation and the deployment of all the custom iOS and Android apps for restaurant phases, helping them increase their conversion rates and in-restaurant footfall to a much greater extent than before. 

We serve the restaurant industry stakeholders with solutions such as: 

• On-premise food order POS development
• Restaurant online ordering app
• Food delivery app development
• Food ordering apps development 
• Inventory management solutions
• Restaurant web portals 
• Waiter management solutions 
• Restaurant chains
• Kitchen display system etc. 

The next step lies with the beginning itself – building a mobile app for your restaurant. Talk to our domain experts to get started today.

THE AUTHOR

Prateek Saxena

DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER