How Much Does It Cost to Build a Fantasy Sports App? Estimating Your Required Budget

The global market for fantasy sports competitions continues to expand and is expected to grow from $29B in 2024 to $67B by 2033. Demand for fan engagement tools keeps growing fueled by the skyrocketing popularity of various leagues and sports competitions.

However, an important consideration remains for all businesses looking to leverage this opportunity: the cost of building a fantasy sports app. To help you with planning, let’s analyze cost factors in fantasy sports app development, ways to reduce budgets, and available monetization strategies.

The estimated cost of a fantasy sports app varies between $20,000 and $100,000. Based on scope and complexity, app projects can be divided into three main categories:

Business Analysis and Design

Before writing any code, it’s crucial to understand the market, validate your idea, and create a product vision that aligns with your business objectives. The business analysis and design phase typically includes:

• gathering and analyzing business requirements
• defining core features and the app’s structure
• designing user flows and wireframes
• creating a visual concept or clickable prototype
• preparing an estimate/documentation and timelines
• assisting with pitch decks and investor presentations

This initial phase helps ensure your idea is viable, feasible, and engaging for stakeholders, saving money and time in the long run.

Typical cost: $2,000 – $6,000

MVP App

The MVP of a fantasy sports platform includes market-ready apps with key functionality to:

• make the service available for real users as quickly as possible
• acquire paying fantasy competition participants
• discover real-world expectations of fantasy sports fans in order to validate your initial idea

Typical cost: $25,000 – $60,000

Full-fledged System

A full-fledged fantasy sports app provides a rich and advanced set of features, a unique design, and complex backend infrastructure needed to:

• handle competition-related data from multiple sources and a heavy user load
• ensure the best possible fantasy sports experience
• add and flexibly manage different fantasy events and contests
• and do even more

Typical cost: $65,000 – $100,000+

Let’s consider the most significant factors that can increase or decrease the cost to create a fantasy sports app

The number of platforms supported affects the scope of a fantasy sports project. This is why businesses with a limited budget need to choose whether they want to launch on iOS, Android, web, or all platforms.

By selecting only one platform, you can lower the initial backend and API development costs. However, you may need to redesign your fantasy sports system or develop an API later when you expand your app to more platforms.

We recommend using a native development approach for a fantasy sports app because uncompromised user engagement is crucial for the success of apps in this category. On the downside, you will have to build and manage two separate code bases.

You may consider launching a cross-platform or hybrid solution to save up to 30% on development costs. Still, limitations of cross-platform/hybrid apps in terms of both capabilities and the overall look and feel may leave something to be desired compared to a native fantasy sports app. 

You can also launch a responsive web app to minimize costs. However, a web-based fantasy sports app can be less convenient for smartphone users than a mobile app and can be resource-consuming without proper expertise in web app optimization. 

Note that these estimates only include user app development costs. Your project may also require business analysis, design, API, and DevOps services.

Implementing rules for fantasy sports competitions requires careful planning and execution, and trying to integrate as many rules as possible can quickly lead to cost creep.

To stay within your budget, you should limit your fantasy sports app to one particular set of rules — for example, for daily or season-long fantasy sports.

Both the location and experience of your fantasy sports app development team will directly affect your costs. Onshore developers are the most expensive. While they can likely provide you with the best cultural fit, they may not meet your budget. 

Developers from India and Southeast Asia offer the lowest hourly rates. However, when working with developers from these regions there is a high risk of hiring an inexperienced team that will extend the timeline and produce a low-quality solution. As a result, maintenance, optimization, scaling, and expansion can be unreasonably expensive.

You can find the right skills, reasonable costs, and a strong cultural fit by hiring fantasy sports engineers from Central and Eastern Europe.

Besides development expenses, you should allocate a maintenance budget for app hosting, updates, and health monitoring. You will require a DevOps engineer to:

A dedicated maintenance team can be required on highly complex fantasy sports projects serving millions of active users. However, you can keep maintenance costs relatively low until you grow that big.

The cost to build a fantasy sports app is higher for a more complex project with customizable features. While common features, such as authentication and basic user profiles, can be completed quickly and cost-efficiently, unique functionality can be expensive.

When you plan complex features, such as custom analytics tools, an AI advisor, or win probability calculations, you should be prepared that they may take longer to develop.

The following tasks increase the system complexity and require extensive work on the back end:

Design costs depend on the number of screens and the amount of customization. When developing a fantasy sports app for both iOS and Android, you will need to customize the UI based on each platform’s specific guidelines. 

Also, you will need to adjust the layouts to different screen sizes, which can take more time for Android devices due to greater platform fragmentation.

Application testing and quality assurance can take up to 30% of the total development time for a fantasy sports app. However, testing and QA is crucial for improving quality and minimizing user churn. 

The right scope of load testing is key for fantasy sports app performance. QA engineers need input from the marketing team on planned promotional activities and estimated user registrations to calculate load testing needs. 

Fantasy sports apps provide:

Fantasy sports features let end users:

Admin features allow system administrators to:

Leveraging cutting-edge technology can help you win a leading market position, allowing you to meet changing user preferences and growing expectations. You can integrate:

Deciding on a revenue model in advance and testing it in a market study can save costs when developing a fantasy sports app. The app can combine one or several monetization strategies:

• ads 
• freemium:
  • paid access to advanced functionality
  • tiered subscriptions
  • entrance fees
• brand promotion
• sponsorships, partnerships, and donations
• white-label licensing

Let’s consider these in detail.

Here are the key strategies that will help you minimize the cost of developing a fantasy sports app:

IT Craft is here to help you with cost-effective fantasy sports application development, meeting your business needs with a tailored solution. We provide all the expertise needed to:

Picking Duck is an iOS app that provides users with a safe fantasy sports playground where they can learn new skills.

Our client was looking for a team that could take over an ongoing project, help with its timely delivery, and keep fantasy sports app development costs within the initial estimates.

The IT Craft team offered a plan and started implementing it immediately, helping the client enter the market with a high-quality native iOS app for fantasy sports novices. The team also provided application updates upon the client’s request.

Building a mobile fantasy sports app cost-efficiently depends on the development team’s expertise and their ability to meet the client’s unique business challenges and reflect the long-term vision.

The key factors a development team should assess when estimating the cost to build a fantasy sports app include: 

You can save money by starting with a discovery phase, building a flexible MVP, using popular future-proof technologies, and — most importantly — hiring expert developers who know how to launch your fantasy sports product.