How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Beauty Salon App?

On-demand apps rule today, where technology is connecting service providers and customers. Be it food delivery apps or healthcare apps; businesses are actively seeking app development services to expand their customer reach and ease of accessibility.

The beauty industry is growing exponentially with the rise of personal care awareness, urbanization, and changing lifestyles. According to Grand View Research, the global beauty salon market is projected to grow at 8.0% of CAGR between the period of 2023 to 2030. This projection makes it an ideal sector to invest in and grow revenue.

So, if you are venturing into the beauty salon industry and wondering how much it cost to develop a beauty salon app? It can cost between $12,000 and $1,00,000 based on type, platform, app size, feature set, and other factors. Want to know more? Here is the detailed blog to introduce you to details on custom mobile app development services and their cost estimations.

What is a Beauty Salon App?

A beauty salon app is a web-based platform designed to help salon businesses attract clients online and streamline their operations. These apps support scheduling appointments, selling products, conducting business operations, and engaging customers. Recently, there has been a sharp rise in demand for these apps as they keep users engaged 24/7 hours and flash sales offers and discounts. It helps simplify finding, booking, and managing beauty services.

A user-friendly beauty salon app will boost business growth and attract clients in this data-driven world. Apart from simplifying appointments, salon professionals are gaining the advantage of a digital boost. Salon app monetization is another key aspect to invest in development; it helps maximize the use of applications and generate more revenue with ads.

Unlike traditional methods, this beauty salon app helps solve major problems faced by businesses that result in losing their potential customers. It includes:

• It reduces waiting time by automating the scheduling process
• Highlighting services with digital content and client images
• In-app deals and coupons attract new users
• Easy payment solutions like credit cards, debit cards, Gpay, etc
• Tracking all details of billing, tickets, contact, and sales reports

Types of Beauty Salon Apps

Beauty salon apps are revolutionizing the way professionals are delivering beauty services. It helps in connecting virtual directories and networks of salons, spas, and stylists. Beauty salon apps can be of different types for targeting specific services or integrating all the required features into one app. Here are the following categories of apps:

1. Appointment Booking Apps

This beauty salon app is solely focused on allowing customers to use the applications for appointment bookings with preferred salons and their favorite stylists. Apart from online scheduling, it displays time slots and automated reminders for clients for better follow-up and feedback. The NineHertz is the leading appointment scheduling app development services provider.

2. Salon Management Apps

It majorly targets salon operations part by managing staff job schedules, inventory details, and bookings. Additionally, you can integrate analytical tools and POS (Point-of-Sale) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools to cover additional business requirements.

3. Stylists Apps

If any salon owner wants to grow their brand as a stylist, they can use these apps to run their independent work and manage client bookings and coordination. You can easily find interesting features of stylist profiles with details of photos, specialization, and customer reviews.

4. Beauty Marketplace Apps

It allows users to browse multiple salons catering to target services and pick the one that fits their pricing and beauty standards. So, here, multiple businesses can register with their unique profile and dashboards to help users navigate with opting services.

5. E-Commerce Beauty Salon Apps

These apps are ideal for salon owners who are dealing with beauty products on a large scale and aim to venture their brands along with salon services. It easily integrates listicles displaying prices, quantity, and ingredients for easy online deliveries.

6. On-Demand Beauty Apps

Recently, due to an increased demand for in-home delivery services, beauty salon stylists are available to visit homes for styling and other services. These apps support integrated features of location tracking, real-time scheduling, and payment integration.

So, these are multiple apps that professionals can select to grow their salon brands. Now, let’s move ahead with understanding how much it will cost to build a Salon booking App.

Cost to Build a Beauty Salon App

Spotting the question of how much it cost to build a salon booking app depends on multiple factors, including app features, platform, developers’ skills, and others. However, let’s take a look at the cost distribution for developing a beauty salon app:

Overall, the salon app development cost will also depend on the complexities and app sizes, here are a few more estimations:

• For a basic beauty salon app, it will cost you around between $10,000 to $30,000
• For an average app, the cost will fall under the range of $30,000 – to $60,000
• And, if you want to develop a tech app with more complex features, it will cost you around $60,000 – $1,50,000

Factors Affecting the Cost of Building a Salon Booking App

Developing a on demand beauty services app has its complexities, whether you require it on a small or large scale, in understanding each feature and expectations of salon professionals. Let’s discuss multiple factors and understand how these factors influence the cost of building a salon booking app:

1. App Functionality & Features

It involves the decision of whether you require basic or complex features, such as user profiles, appointment bookings, service listings, AI integration, and loyalty programs, that will affect the overall cost estimation. If you opt for the minimal app, it will require less investment, while adding complexities will increase prices.

2. Platform Choice

If you are opting for a single platform like iOS or Android, there will be less cost to develop a Beauty Salon App. However, if you prefer using cross-platform platforms like Flutter and React Native, it will be more cost-effective; however, it comes with some limitations for performance.

3. UI/UX Complexities

Choosing the minimalist and template-based design will reduce the salon app development cost due to easy integration. On the other side, customized features of UI/UX like unique animations and responsive layout, can increase overall design costs due to its high load and architecture.

4. Technology Stack

As the development technology is upgraded, integrating modern frameworks like Swift, Node.js, Flutter, or React Native can impact overall cost depending on developer expertise and framework licensing. Additionally, database, cloud service, API gateway, and push notifications can further add to development costs.

5. Third-Party Integration

A few third-party integrations, like the payment gateway of Stripe or PayPal or adding Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, will add more complexities and cost as well. Additionally, social media logins can also increase initial costs but overall increase usability.

6. Developing Teams

It also depends on whether you are hiring an experienced in-house team of developers that will require more cost of hiring, training, and resource allocation. Otherwise, you can outsource with a mobile app development company in India to charge for specific projects, feature integration, or bug fixes and pay them accordingly.

7. Development Timelines

If there is a short deadline for developing the beauty salon app, it will create high costs due to the limited scope of negotiation. However, with the help of flexible deadlines, it allows for cost-effective decisions by investing strategically in target services but will develop apps with longer delivery times.

8. Maintenance and Updates

After the post-launch of your beauty salon app, there come additional requirements of regular updates, feature upgradation, or bug fixes that increase incurring expenses in addition to the cost to build a salon booking app. Overall, annual maintenance costs will be around 15 to 20% of initial development costs.

Top 5 Beauty Salon Booking Apps in USA

Let’s discuss the top beauty salon booking apps in the USA with additional details of their features and target audiences.

Must-have Features to Build a Salon Appointment App

Any ideal salon appointment app must contain all the required features that salon owners require to ease their scheduling. However, it is further divided into core and advanced features, which are:

1. Core Features

Here are suggested core components that developers should include in the beauty salon app:

a. Scheduling

Easy scheduling is a must-have feature for beauty salon apps that show real-time availability slots to book appointments by integrating an easy-to-use calendar interface.

b. Service Navigation

It highlights the service options, such as hairstyle and cuts, skin care, and nail and makeup services with a smooth navigation user interface. It also provides you with a selection of your preferred stylists.

c. Bookings Confirmation

The key feature that helps users with bookings is an automated message or e-mail that clients receive after their booking confirmation and updated customer information.

d. Workforce Management

Integrating the feature of the dashboard for staff scheduling, appointment tracking, and handling no-shows and rescheduling to manage the queries of unattended services or bookings effectively.

e. Signup & Login

Next, adding an automated system of customer profiles with auto-fill sections of customer information, preferences, and history helped to share the personalized user experience. It helps in recording client information to communicate any delays or changes.

f. Loyalty Program

For marketing support and better engagement, the feature of in-built loyalty programs and festive offers that result in recording points and rewards. Further, coupon offers and recommendations would help to attract new clients.

g. Notifications & Reminders

Follow-up features help in client retention, so reminders for appointments, rescheduling, add-on services, or payments will increase engagement. Also, it adds reminders for cancellations and timely refunds.

2. Advanced Features

a. Paying Mechanism

Payment gateway integration like PayPal and Stripe eases access to accepting all online payment modes like digital wallets, debit cards, credit cards, UPIs, or bank transfers.

b. Waiting Lobby

The waiting list section will allow the customer to save time for the in-salon queue. Instead, they can track progress over time and take on services. You can either integrate an alert system or notifications to keep you updated.

c. Testimonials

These sections in applications will help collect reviews and ratings followed by customer feedback on services. You can add different formats, such as texts and images, and record videos for real-time feedback.

d. Push Notifications

These notifications keep flashing on the screen to update customers on new promotions and special offers. It comes on the top notification bar on the smartphone screen, which helps keep you updated.

e. Staff Management

It helps monitor staff performance based on customer reviews and bookings with an analytical dashboard that adds real-time updates with further details on information and scheduling.

f. Inventory Tools

Tracker tools to monitor inventory levels for managing purchase and sales of beauty products to generate timely reports. Further, the features of automated alerts for low stock and any delays.

g. Analytics

Generating the data for revenue, each sale, recording revenue, and studying the customer pattern for opting services. It also tracks how customers discover the app, time spent, and most preferred features.

Conclusion on Cost to Build a Salon App

Investing in a well-developed beauty salon app can yield substantial returns and provide better insights. As business expand their online presence, an app can deliver long-term values like customer satisfaction and revenue growth. Depending on its complexities and salon professionals’ expectations, it is more feasible to connect with an app development company for expertise.

If you are serious about scaling your salon’s customer base and digital experience, understanding your business first and researching your competitors will help you design a perfect app that will stand out in the beauty industry. With technological advancement, there will be more innovations ahead in salon app development with the use of Augmented Reality, AI-driven chatbots, and integrated marketing tools.

FAQ’s on Beauty Salon App Development Cost

1. How long will it take to create a beauty salon app?

The development timeline for a beauty salon app depends on a few factors. It can directly or indirectly impact the overall duration. A simple app with minimal features will take around 3 to 4 months, but if you prefer to add more complex features, then this can go beyond 4 months for final deployment.

2. How much does it cost to build a beauty salon application?

On average, the cost of developing a beauty salon app will fall between the range of $35,000 to $1,00,000 depending on app size, core features, and others.

3. What are the benefits of making a beauty service app for your business?

Some of the key benefits of developing a beauty service app for businesses are 24-hour accessibility, easy rescheduling, personalized experience, push notifications, automation reminders, easy bookings and scheduling.

4. Which is the best salon app development company?

NineHertz is one of the best salon app development companies with 15+ years of experience, making use of integrated technologies like AI, AR, ML, or blockchain to build best-performing on-demand mobile apps.