On-demand delivery services have been around us for many years; however, passing down from year to year, the way to provide such services has been modernized a lot. Exerting mobile-first and tech-first approaches, on-demand delivery apps like Glovo, UberEats, Deliveroo, and GrubHub, are framing an entire user-centric economy.
The story behind each of these delivery apps is bizarre. It influences and arises divergent thinking into youth to come up with their own business idea. Glovo, for example, a Spanish on-demand delivery startup by a 27 years-old, Oscar Pierre, has achieved over 30Million downloads within five years only.
What exactly did the young man Oscar did that people couldn’t stay back to use his app? And how much such On-Demand Delivery App Development Cost? Es confuso!
Let us make it simple for you. Deem this research as your guide. We will start with a short inspirational story of Glovo, then discuss how much it costs to Build an App like Glovo.
So, let’s get to the story behind the Glovo first.
An inspirational origin of Glovo
Glovo means balloon in Spanish, and it was founded in 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud. Originally, the application idea was of young, ambitious Oscar, who studied at Georgia Tech, in the United States to explore better opportunities. However, he quitted his job after three months of joining Europe’s largest aerospace group, Airbus, to start his own thing.
Out of his bunch of ideas, he felt Glovo is much fascinating: Building a platform that connects busy people with the Glovo team that could do their daily tasks or errands.
Founder and CEO, Pierre, started with an MVP in his own town Barcelona, Spain, in 2015, it was “a super simple app.” It had only two buttons to order or send something, but it didn’t work well in terms of growth. Though, the company was able to find the main issues behind the failure: the prices were too high, and workers felt as if they were working in a restaurant as users mostly asked for the menu.
During the phase, they almost went bankrupt. Nevertheless, somehow, the mastermind managed funding to run the Glovo on the top instead of giving up. Since then, it has raised €460 million from shareholders, and lately, it also has achieved the title of a Unicorn startup valued above $1 Billion. With justifying its tag line “Order anything,” Glovo offers the whole nine yards to order and get delivered anywhere at any time.
Young successful entrepreneur argues to deliver any order in 30 minutes within the city. Glovo is rooted in nearly 26 countries and over 288 cities with having across 20000 partners and 50000 drivers to deliver orders by bicycle and motorcycle. People of Spain, Italy, and Portugal are now used to order anything from meals to diapers, flowers, medicine, and other goods.
The share of food delivery is extensive in Glovo, of course. The founder believes online food delivery has massive potential, and it’s expected to grow seven times faster. However, he also said that despite ¾ revenue drives from food delivery, he thinks Food is the starting point of much bigger, similar to Amazon started by selling books.
Glovo makes 70-75% of its business revenue out of the commission model. They charged commission from their partner stores from hundreds of cities; hence, it has become the primary revenue stream. Besides, the model makes the app more convenient and affordable for the targeted audience.
Furthermore, Glovo is very smooth sailing in penetrating the international market strategically. They focus on regions where competition to face is less such as Latin America, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, etc. Besides, after succeeding in Madrid, the app is all set to launch its Dark Store globally. The store focuses on delivering groceries to make it possible to order 24/7 with the fastest delivery.
Check out Oscar Pierre’s interview to know more about how Glovo and its influencing journey.
Glovo’s success inspires many entrepreneurs to start something like this super app that solves every problem of the target audience. The concept is pliable that even a well-established delivery business can also begin scaling the business.
There are many hidden advantages to keep up and bind the audience to an app. Partnering with local vendors based on commission enables them to offer service more affordably and faster. It enhances the chances of users turning into customers and then to become loyal customers. Nonetheless, every business needs to invest first before reaping the benefits. So, let us find out how much it cost to develop an app like Glovo.
Cost to Develop an On-Demand Delivery App like Glovo
As part of a mobile app development company, it is essential to highlight that app development cost relies on several factors. You may have encountered many articles focusing solely on the cost, but they could still not give you an accurate answer. The project manager can only estimate it after analyzing and prioritizing your app requirements.
On the contrary, if you comprehend factors affecting the cost to make an app like Glovo, you can make informed decisions. Such factors include features & functionality, app platforms, the development team, and the development team’s location. Let’s have a brief understanding of each element.
Features & functionality like Glovo:
Each feature consumes stipulated time to be built in the app and impacts straightly on the development cost. On top of that, software developers charge hourly. This means the more features you integrate into the app, the costlier it will be. Here, we will look into Glovo’s distinctive features in the flow of its working pattern. You can consider the same if you are planning for a similar project.
Register Glovo allows users to register by exerting their Facebook account, or a user can sign up using email as well.
Enter the location As soon as a user signs in the app; it asks to enter their location to showcase relevant offers around the user. A user can add multiple locations as well.
My information: A user can add and edit personal information such as name, password, phone number, payment methods, and get invoice information.
Order Anything It’s the first feature of Glovo that allows users to type anything they want to order. But it should fit in their yellow backpack and is available in the city. Users also can upload the picture of the item to find and order it on Glovo.
Moreover, it includes a direct button to order Food, Supermarket for groceries, Pharmacy & shops, and breakfast snacks for quick delivery.
Delivery Express It is the feature to send something to someone. A user needs to enter a pick-up address and delivery with a note about the courier you want to pick-up or drop-off. Items, for example, documents, keys, or a laptop. It lets the user even schedule the pick-up time and pay online.
Scan to order Another unique feature that allows a user to scan Glovo’s QR code in a restaurant or store to see the menu and place the order through Glovo.
Share and earn To nurture and expand the user base, there is nothing as lucrative as offering perks to your existing customers. Glovo does the same by providing a unique code to every user to share and invite friends and earn €500 on each friend. T&C apply.
My Orders It is where a user can see past orders, ongoing orders, and track the same quickly.
These are the features of the user’s side app. However, it is common in on-demand delivery apps to build a separate app for delivery personnel and admin to put the business on complete autopilot.
If you are willing to know your ropes better, scrutinize these 13 factors to consider while developing a food delivery app.
Development process, hours & rate
The development segment is a paramount section that includes your idea analysis, designing, coding, testing, and launching. It also embodies a specialist to perform each task related to your app development. If you want to hire On-demand App Developers, you can either hire from any outsourcing company or hire freelancers.
From the cost-effectiveness and risk perspective, hiring freelancers or creating an in-house developers team is entailing great expense. Conversely, outsourcing developers or an on-demand development company from Asia, Kody Technolab, for example, is a far effectual choice. You don’t require to manage any team or worry about the quality as the company takes the responsibility of delivering a caliber product.
Moving back to the cost of developing an on-demand delivery app. The cost calculated by multiplying the development rate by hours taken to complete the project. To estimate the project, let’s split the main tasks and approximate time taken to finish the same by the specialist.
| Particular | iOS – $20/hour | Android – $20/hour |
| UI/UX Design | 90 hours – $1800 | 110 hours – $2200 |
| iOS / Android Development | 400 hours – $8,000 | 400 hours – $8,000 |
| Front-end & Back-end development | 200 hours – $4,000 | 200 hours – $4,000 |
| Testing | 80 hours – $1600 | 80 hours – $1600 |
| Total | 770 hours – $15,400 | 790 hours – $15,800 |
Summing Up
We see how many hours required approximately to develop an on-demand delivery app like Glovo for iOS and Android platforms. And the app development cost calculates hourly. These both attributes proportionate to the cost of developing a delivery app like Glovo. Above all, the noteworthy thing is that the rate of development differs from region to region.
Meaning, hiring developers from the USA can cost you an arm and a leg, whereas developers from the Asian region can save your pocket. However, it requires a marvelous fusion of skills and experience to build an engaging and user-friendly app. For that, you must check how much experience developers have in the same domain. We would be glad if you peek into our Delivery App Portfolio.