The web portal is a resource center that can carry all the resources of your business. Businesses wish to customize the portals as per their business workflow. Making changes means you require experts who can help you upgrade your product. But for small and medium businesses, the cost of developing a portal and/or customizing it plays a huge role. They usually have a constrained budget and to find a resource that can provide them with all the functionalities they were looking for. The cost of developing a web portal depends on a lot of factors. In this article, let us discuss it in detail.
Factors Affecting the Cost of Web Portal Development
Here we will discuss four major reasons that define the cost of a portal.
- Hiring Freelancers or Outsourcing the Project
This choice is very much personal and depends on the budget you are planning to allocate from the development process. Hiring freelancers can be affordable for your project but it comes with many risks. For example, freelancers might not have relevant experience, or are unable to deliver the project on time. You have to hire different developers for designing, backend, database management, etc. Collaborating them and ensuring that they are on the same page is difficult. It might be possible that teams are unable to agree on certain terms. This can be a huge risk for your project and can delay the portal delivery. However, outsourcing the project to a web portal development company is a much safer option. The companies already have a team of experienced developers. The coordination is also better in the companies. So, by spending a little more you can have assurance on timely delivery and you do not have to spend time on coordinating the developers.
- Functionalities in the Portal
The more you add the more it will cost. The cost as well as time of developing the portal depends on the functionalities that you want in your portal. If you wish to have more features or more complex features than obviously it will cost you more. Here are some features that must go on your web portal.
- User profile management
- Document management
- Advanced search bar
- Reports and Analytics
- Custom dashboard
- Self-service tools
- Skillset of Your Team
If you wish to have a portal that is proficient in every way then you require an experienced developer. But hiring an experienced developer or experienced team of developers means they have a higher hourly rate. The positive side to this is that they work faster which means quick deliveries and more polished products. Your team must have developers excelling different programming languages so that you have a refined product that runs without any errors. If you wish to run the project for a long period of time, you must hire a team of experienced developers who build your portal with their experience and understanding.
The Cost of Hosting and Developing a Web Portal
There are various charges that you need to consider while developing and hosting the portal.
- Domain Hosting: The domain hosting charges can vary from $50 to $1000 per month.
- Designing: Depending on the quality of design this cost varies from $500 to $15000.
- Hourly Rates of Developers: The hourly rates of developers depends on where you are hiring them. Here are the different rates of developers.
- USA: $150 to $200 per hour
- Europe: $80 to $100 per hour
- Asia: $20 to $50 per hour
- Additional Cost: If you wish to add plugins to your portal for more functionality, it can cost from $500 to $5000.
Considering all the costs mentioned above, the portal can cost you from $5000 to $50,000 depending on the features, quality and requirement. If you have complex and extreme features to add then, this cost can still go higher.
Conclusion
To have a web portal for your business is a need for today and an unnecessary step in scaling the business. Portals simplify your workflow and increase the efficiency of your team members. Developing a web portal can be challenging but once you find the right company for the development process you will be delivered a portal with amazing features. You can discuss your requirements and ask the developers their suggestions on what more you can do to make the portal more feature rich. They will always have suggestions on what should and what not. This talk helps in reducing extra cost that goes behind features that you do not require.
