A business building its first mini program usually does not know what the fees are, which is a poor position to negotiate from. Here is the itemised list.
1. Verification
Registering the account is free. Verification is not available to individual entities, and a non-individual mini program pays 300 yuan a year for it, counted from the date of payment.
There are two ways to avoid that 300 yuan. One is to reuse the qualification of an already-verified official account: the verification can be carried out from the official account, and the fee is waived.
The other is through a service provider’s privileged channel. The platform grants certified providers certain privileges, including free verification, so a mini program registered through such a provider can be verified at no cost.
2. Production
There are two routes: a third-party provider, or building it yourself. For a business without technical staff, building it yourself is not advisable, for two reasons. It is hard to get a good result, and nobody guarantees the maintenance afterwards.
Which is why the large majority of mini programs in the market are built by providers. The mode should follow the difficulty of the requirement. For a small or mid-sized business, a template covers day-to-day operation and a reasonable amount of extension, with prices in the low thousands depending on the package.
A custom build has no such ceiling. The production cost is higher, running from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands depending on the requirement, and what you get for it is functions and interface design built around your business rather than around a template.
3. Domain, server and certificate
A mini program still needs these configured, and this is the section where costs appear that buyers did not expect.
- Domain: a .com is fine, and it needs ICP filing. Tens of yuan a year.
- Server: sized by capacity, traffic and speed requirements. From a few thousand yuan. For a mini program with steady daily users, take a dedicated server, because the configuration can be upgraded as the business grows.
- SSL certificate: OV, DV or EV depending on the type of mini program and the level of payment and confidentiality required, and the price varies accordingly.
The question to ask before signing
Most established providers include the domain, the server and the certificate in the package price, which means the merchant does not have to source them separately and is not charged again later.
So confirm it explicitly. Understand each of the three lines above, and ask whether they are included. The complaint that follows a finished project is almost always about a charge the buyer did not know existed, and it is cheaper to settle that on the quotation than afterwards.
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