How much does it cost to develop a fantasy football app like DraftKings?
Fantasy football app development has garnered widespread popularity with sports enthusiasts enjoying their favourite sport via a digital medium. The popularity of fantasy sports can be estimated by the industry’s valuation at USD 25.97 billion in 2023 and potential to reach USD 57.4 billion by 2030.
Naturally, businesses are inclined towards the potential of this lucrative market with a constantly expanding user base and want to follow successful apps like DraftKings. As such, one of the foremost questions is the cost to build a fantasy football app. In this blog, we will help you understand factors determining the fantasy sports app development cost and what it takes to build an app users love.
Table of Contents
- Understanding Fantasy Sports App Development
- Fantasy Sports Software Development Cost
- Development Platform
- App features
- White-label vs Custom solution
- User Experience Design
- Fantasy Sports API
- Conclusion
Understanding Fantasy Sports App Development
When you’re considering building a successful fantasy sports app like DraftKings, you should understand why it is so popular among users. Fantasy sports apps must ensure that users enjoy a seamless gaming experience on their platform and come back for more. As such, gaming experience must be aligned with desired business outcomes.
The key to generating a stable revenue stream from fantasy sports apps is eliminating all friction points from users’ gaming journey- such as selecting teams, competing with friends, and winning matches with their skills and strategic prowess. With user excitement at its peak, fantasy sports apps should be able to simplify their decision-making, enable seamless team selection, reduce their cognitive load by balancing information hierarchy, automating point calculation, and so on.
However, building such an app needs you to balance its technicalities, implement proper monetization strategies, provide an exciting and smooth user experience, and build a stable stream of revenue, while simultaneously focusing on other core areas of your business. This is where a seasoned fantasy football development company can help you ensure your fantasy sports app is a growth engine and meets the vision you have for it.
With that said, now let us dive into the behind-the-scenes of fantasy sports app development and understand factors determining its cost.
Fantasy Sports Software Development Cost
It is important to understand that the breakdown of expenses for developing a fantasy sports app will vary according to your business needs, choice of sports, the technology used for building the app, the level of functionality you want to offer to your users, and so on. Every business is unique and as such, the following factors determine the cost of building a fantasy sports app.
Development Platform
Native app development (specific development for Android and iOS) requires separate codebases for both. This makes it more expensive than Cross-platform app development (eliminates the need to maintain two separate codebases with frameworks like React Native and Flutter). Hybrid app development, which entails the combined potential of web and native applications also enables you to work across several platforms with a single codebase (using frameworks like Flutter, React Native and Xamarin).
The cost of developing a DraftKings-style fantasy sports app for iOS and Android will depend on the development platform, based on how you want your app to perform and the kind of experience you want to provide to your users. Native app development is generally considered the best for completely seamless app experiences and top performance. DraftKings itself has native iOS and Android applications.
App features
The kind of features your fantasy sports app has also have a decisive role in determining its cost. Naturally, an app with basic fantasy gaming features like team creation, player selection, and so on will cost less than an app that provides a personalized and immersive experience to users, with advanced features like real-time game lineup notifications, customizable contests, predictor modules, and so on. Besides, the investment in building fantasy sports app features tailored to your business needs is higher than going with a standard set of the same.
Therefore, the price to build a fantasy football app with features like DraftKings would include charges for features like daily and weekly contests, scheduling contests, cash prizes and withdrawals, real-time challenges with friends, betting types, and “Showdown”, where users can enjoy personalized competition play against an opponent.
However, fantasy sports app features also include those of the Admin panel, such as team analytics, state restriction (for Play Store approvals in states where online betting apps are not permissible), player analytics, Master module for game rule customization, automatic point calculation, instant ID verification, payment gateway integration, and so on. These features are important as they give you full control over your app by providing all necessary information required to assess the app’s health at a glance. With all information easily at your disposal, you can eliminate the need to pay recurring maintenance fees later and manage your fantasy sports business effectively, on your own.
White-label vs Custom Solution
Another decisive factor in the DraftKings app development cost is whether you want a white-label solution, or a custom solution tailored to your business needs and built from scratch. The best white-label fantasy football software development company will enable you to get to the market within 7-14 days with a customizable design, multiple sports and formats, and standard fantasy features. With lesser investment compared to custom development, you can go to market and test the solution before you launch at full scale.
With custom fantasy football app development, the solution is built from scratch exactly the way your business needs. Along with features tailor-made for your business, you will also get the source code of your solution, which takes around 1-3 months to go to market. The key here is building a solution that is tailored to fit the unique needs of your business, whose features are relevant for your target users and can engage them consistently like DraftKings.
User Experience Design
User experience can make or break the game for your fantasy football app. If users cannot achieve their goals of using a fantasy sports app (as mentioned above), and enjoy an immersive experience, then they have reason to churn out in the favour of another offering that provides them the seamless experience they expect.
Estimating the cost to develop a fantasy football app like DraftKings entails understanding their focus on constantly simplifying user journeys. Users enjoy the seamless navigation provided by the DraftKings app, as they can access crucial parts of the platform at a single click- such as the Home, My Bets, In-Game, Rewards, and so on. Additionally, users can select specific leagues and promos very easily to get an instant, detailed breakdown of betting information for the markets they prefer.
Fantasy Sports API
Fantasy sports API solutions significantly reduce your development costs because they offer ready-to-use data, so you need not aggregate it from scratch. Fantasy football app developers can make use of these solutions to build apps that meet your unique vision as they can customize data to meet the specific needs of the sports platform they are working on. With a seasoned fantasy sports API provider, you can readily get all the data required for your fantasy sports app at your disposal, such as historical player performance, live statistics, complete commentary, and more for various sports like football, cricket, kabaddi, and so on.
Conclusion
In addition to the above-mentioned factors, the development timeline will also govern the cost to build a fantasy sports app. With an experienced fantasy football development company, your project scope will be clearly defined, eliminating any potential chances of scope creep. Not only that, but the experienced service provider will also have an in-depth knowledge of all technologies to build a fantasy football app, with a proven track-record of delivering on time, given prior knowledge of development pitfalls. This will reduce your time-to-launch and cut down on development costs.
Another major factor influencing the cost of developing a fantasy football app is the specific regulations of each country your users reside in. It is according to these regulations and license requirements that fantasy football features must be built to ensure a seamless experience for users irrespective of where they are. As such, fantasy football app features and development cost will vary for each business, and implementing the success of apps like DraftKings will entail considering their focus on user experience, app functionality, navigation, and constant means of innovation for their expanding user base, enhancing the core value proposition of fantasy sports apps.