A custom-built mini program is developed to the client’s needs, creating an exclusive entrance into the WeChat ecosystem for the company. Built around the company’s business requirements, it fits the enterprise’s actual situation better, raises business processing efficiency more effectively and strengthens the company’s competitiveness in its industry; a promotional custom mini program incorporates the corporate culture and highlights the brand image; and for consumer-facing mini programs, building in the company’s particular marketing ideas raises user stickiness.
Custom development has all these advantages, but building a custom mini program well requires a rigorous software engineering process to control the work. Quoting for such a project is affected by the client’s requirements, the technical solution, timing and other factors; the developer must weigh the specific product requirements and development cycle before giving an accurate quote. The main factors are as follows.
1. The software engineering workflow
A proper software company manages custom development through a formal workflow. So many stages involve nine distinct roles (sales manager, product manager, pre-sales engineer, UI designer, Java back-end developer, mini program front-end developer, test engineer, configuration manager and DBA), and some roles may have several people. A proper development team invests that much manpower, which is why the minimum investment for a project is never the few hundred yuan people imagine for a custom product.
Some less scrupulous small companies cut corners, dropping parts of the management process. The initial cost looks lower, but project quality falls, hidden defects accumulate, and all sorts of problems surface once the product is delivered and running.
2. The client’s software requirements
The requirements describe the functions, interfaces and goals of the mini program overall. The developer designs and builds the product from the requirements and ideas the client or merchant puts forward. In early communication, the developer turns the client’s requirements into a requirements document, agrees the boundaries and scope of development, helps the merchant refine functional modules and business processes, and confirms a low-fidelity prototype built with a prototyping tool. More complex business logic demands a stronger product manager, who not only sorts out requirements up front but also guides developers to understand the business correctly during development so the product matches the plan 100 percent, and guides testers in the later test stage. The product manager runs through the whole project life cycle, so the corresponding labour cost is real; complex projects need highly capable, highly paid product managers, and larger projects mean longer schedules. The product manager’s cost belongs to requirements analysis in software engineering terms and is an important component of the mini program quote.
3. Development difficulty
Custom development passes through design, coding, testing and many other stages, and business complexity changes how much manpower each stage consumes. The more functional modules and the more complex the development, the longer the schedule and the higher the professional demands on developers, and the higher the cost. A shopping mall mini program, for example, involves more modules; the more complex the promotion rules, the harder the development, the longer the cycle and the greater the need for senior engineers, and the higher the cost. Quotes naturally rise with complexity.
4. Labour rates
The main cost of custom mini program development is labour. A software service provider calculates each module’s labour cost as the role’s hourly rate multiplied by the workload, then sums every role across all modules into the quote. Rates are affected by regional economic development, the capability and role of the technical staff involved, and the company’s profit margin. Regional imbalances mean wage structures differ between cities; Shenzhen wages are generally higher than Changsha’s, so a Shenzhen team costs more than a Changsha team of equal ability. Roles differ in cost too, as project managers, developers and testers are paid differently, which is easy to understand in any industry. Within a team, people of different seniority and ability carry different rates; strong developers who can build complex modules command higher day rates. Profit margins affect the quote as well: if one company requires a 30 percent margin and Shenzhen Xiaozhushou Technology Co., Ltd. (XZS Tech) requires 10 percent, then with the same region, staffing and workload, the first company’s quote will be 20 percent higher than XZS Tech’s.
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