// Development
How Much does it Cost to Build a Pinterest Clone?
// Development
From this article, you will learn the cost of the development and launch of a Pinterest clone – a social network with identic features and in many respects similar design. We’ll tell you what a similar project’s budget consists of, what each stage (component) of development is like, and how much it costs.
The first thing to do when launching your project is to undertake thorough market research to understand what competitors you have except for Pinterest and find out what features and in what form should be implemented to attract as many users as possible (you can’t please everyone).
During the market research, you should study Pinterest’s target audience, isolate and analyze direct competitors, define the market specificities and acceptable monetization model. It’s also important to determine a particular niche and target audience, which you’ll be focused on.
Target audience research is the creation of an average profile of potential users by studying their interests, preferences, habits, pain areas, and consumer behavior. For this purpose, you need to analyze the audience of Pinterest and Dribbble, DudePins, FoodGawker, and We Heart It, which are very much like it. You can do it on your own using marketing research or by hiring experts.
From these studies, you should learn the following:
Below we show how the screen of the desktop version of Pinterest and advertising by Home Depot and Walmart integrated into it look. Pay attention to the correspondence between sizes of ordinary images and advertising.
If we open a board (category); for example, art deco, we see an invitation to use the text box «More ideas», where apart from a large number of images there will be a suggestion to buy something corresponding with the request «art deco». Besides, you’ll also see advertisements, which not only are the same size but also the same color scheme of the board.
Selling places for advertisements is a perfect option for such platforms as Pinterest, where the main content is photos and images. But when you’ll be creating a Pinterest clone, you don’t have to use only this way to make money. There are other monetization models aside from it:
Here is the developers’ average wage in five of the most popular countries of the offshore development according to the survey of 2000 specialists by CodinGame.
Here are averaged freelancers' hourly rates by regions based on data from such websites as PayScale, SalaryExpert, Indeed, Upwork, and TopTal.
UI / UX. The design of Pinterest is considered one of the best among platforms with images due to its simplicity and conciseness and well-designed algorithm of building a grid of images by their content and size. Therefore, you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel when developing a design of a Pinterest clone – just adapt it to the chosen niche and target audience.
In so doing, don’t forget about the following key aspects:
Web development. After you’ve determined the functionality and design, you’ll need to define the stack of technologies, which will be used to generate code. This will also influence the development cost.
Integration with cloud storage is needed because such online service as Pinterest has to bear a heavy server load: simultaneous impressions of various images to hundreds of thousands of users. Of course, you can make your grid of servers, but it will cost you additional several million dollars. It’s unlikely that such a project will pay off.
As for the cost of the code generation of the Pinterest clone, everything depends on your goals here. If you want to primarily launch MVP, it will cost you at least $7 500 for Ukraine or $20 000 for the USA. Whilst the development of the Pinterest clone with full functionality will cost at least $18 000 for Ukraine or $48 000 for the USA.
You should consider such particularity of Pinterest-like products as multiplatformity when creating the architecture of your project. This allows launching your service on personal computers, smartphones, and tablets. So we recommend you build a mobile app for the Pinterest clone.
The cost of the creation of a mobile app – a Pinterest clone – also depends on whether you want to develop MVP or an app with full functionality. The price of MVP starts at $9 000 for Ukraine and $24 000 for the USA. The cost of a fully-featured mobile app starts at $21 000 for Ukraine and $56 000 for the USA.
When developing a mobile application, pay attention to several things. Firstly, media content load should be as quick as possible while maintaining a high quality of images displaying. On Android, limited resources of the platform might complicate it, so you’ll need to optimize the work with content by means of such libraries as Glide and Picasso.
Secondly, users’ loading images on the server and file zipping and potential problems with content playback such as buffering and slow loading might require mobile device developers’ additional effort. Therefore, you may need more time and money.
The rest of the creation of a Pinterest-like app is practically in no way different from standard work with logic and data when developing mobile products. Here is a full stack of technologies that you may use to create a mobile version of the Pinterest clone for Android and iOS.
Stack for the development of a mobile app – a Pinterest clone – for Android:
Stack for the development of a mobile app – a Pinterest clone for iOS:
After the app deployment, be prepared that the users will complain about bugs, errors, slow work, and other problems. This is normal as not a single software, whoever has created it, is launched in perfect condition. Moreover, even the successful services, which have been working for years, glitch at times because of errors in a code or logic of architecture.
To eliminate post-release problems rapidly, you need a support service, which will get users’ feedback, and a team of programmers, who will eliminate shortcomings. If this is a small project, then the maintenance of these services will cost you at least $2000 per month if specialists from Ukraine will take this over and $5500 per month if American specialists will be dealing with it.
Besides, don’t forget about the cost of hosting and cloud storage. The cheapest hosting for similar projects costs only $20 per month, which is enough for services with less than 1000 simultaneous views. Whilst platforms, which dozens or hundreds of thousands of people are viewing, need hosting for $20 000 or more.
Not to worry about the bandwidth of your hosting, you better connect your Pinterest clone to service providers, who can scale up their services depending on the app load. This allows solving the problem with lags because of a server overload as well as optimizes payment for hosting: a fee is charged for the use – the more capacity people exploited, the more they have paid, and vice versa.
