How Much Would It Cost to Build an AR App Like IKEA Place?

With emerging new technologies, it is expected that businesses will continue to change the ways in which they approach marketing to remain relevant or forge ahead in their given niche. The retail industry will continue to embrace technology in order to create intent-rich, micro moments for their customers. IKEA did just that when they launched their Augmented Reality app that enables customers to place virtual furniture pieces in their living space to see how they fit before purchasing them.

Augmented reality is an amazing technology and it is exciting to see how it is already revolutionizing the furniture retail business. The IKEA Place app has proved that traditional retail businesses can benefit tremendously from an app like this. If you are in the furniture manufacturing or retail business, you certainly need such an app as it will open the door to lots of opportunities and potential revenue streams.
Creating an AR app like that of IKEA will certainly take time and resources, but it is a worthwhile venture that you should certainly consider. Here, we will take a look at how much it may cost to create such an app.

The Cost of Developing an AR App

There are three major processes that are necessary to create an Augmented Reality app of this nature, namely: Design, Development and Testing. We will consider each process as briefly as possible and estimate how long and how much it would typically take to be completed.

Note: We are estimating the hourly rate of developers to be $100. It can be more or less depending on who you hire. Your priority should be quality work.

App Design

For an AR app that will be used for business purposes, design matters a lot. Your customers will pay particular attention to the graphics, so they need to be great. The functionality of the app should also be top notch. The furniture needs to be detailed and realistic to make your customers see how exactly it will fit in their homes so they can make a well-informed decision to buy it.

To create the perfect app design, it would typically take about 150 – 200 hours.

Total cost will be $15,000 – $20,000.

App Coding

Coding is clearly the most important process in the development of your app. For an Augmented Reality app, it will take ingenuity on the part of your developers to create the ideal app with the kind of intuitive functionality seen on the IKEA app. If you’re building the app for both Android and iOS operating systems, the developers would build it separately using Google ARCore for Android and Apple ARKit for iOS, as well as additional tools to create additional features.

It takes considerable effort to create such app features as furniture catalog, the ability to place scaled virtual furniture against real surroundings, with the added capability to change the colors of items, capture photos of the models, email and social sharing/posting capability and so on.

The entire process may take about 250 – 300 hours.

Total cost will be $25,000 – $30,000.

App Testing

This is the last step in the process of creating your app but it is as important as the others for the sake of customer experience. App testing involves finding out usability, performance, compatibility, load, stress and other issues and fixing them. This will ensure a smooth user experience. For an app that is going to be used for business purposes, this process is very important and should take at least, two weeks. If the developers use Agile, each build gets tested in iterative sprints.

We will consider the time it will take to truly test an AR app l as 100 hours.

Total cost for app testing will be $10,000.

Total Cost of Developing an AR App Like IKEA

From the analysis we have provided above:

  • App Design will cost $15,000 – $20,000
  • App coding will cost $25,000 – $30,000
  • App testing will cost $10,000

This will result to a possible total cost of $50,000 – $60,000.

If you are in the furniture manufacturing or retail business, an Augmented Reality app like that of IKEA can be a game changer for you. With roughly 15 percent of the $70 billion market for furniture in the U.S. having moved online, and AR complementing online shopping in a seamless way, businesses that adopt AR would gain a significant early movers advantage. Even if you are on the right trajectory in terms of sales and profit generation, investing in such app will take things to the next level.