How Much Does It Cost to Create the NFT Marketplace?

You have just read the number top-one question in our chart of the most frequently asked questions. So, let's be honest, everything has its price tag. When it comes to creating an NFT marketplace, the time-proven saying 'you get what you pay for' is fully justified. The response to this intriguing question is usually 'It depends', which raises more questions than answers.

You probably have two questions in mind: 'How much money does it cost to make an NFT marketplace?' and 'What does the price depend on?' and search for the answers on the internet. On the web you may come across a few different websites aimed at estimating NFT marketplace development costs, but they are nothing more than a marketing move to attract your attention with brief questions about your requirements. The estimation you receive will not show you the real picture.

In a nutshell, prices of a product can vary from $10,000-$50,000. Quite a gap, isn't it?

That's because custom NFT development costs depend on a bunch of factors. We’re going to focus on them in this article.

How Much Does It Cost to Create an NFT Marketplace Worldwide?

The recent research from GoodFirms shows that the average price of a simple NFT marketplace is between $30,000 to $91,000. The medium complexity app cost is between $55,550 and $131,000. A complex app may cost from $91,550 to $211,000. So, giving a rough answer to how much it costs to create an app (we take the rate of $40 an hour as average): a basic NFT marketplace will cost around $30,000 (Time to develop - 2 months); Medium complexity NFT marketplace will cost between $60,000 (Time to develop - 6 months) ; A complex unique NFT marketplace will cost between $120,000 (Time to develop- 8 months to 1 year).

Thousands of companies around the world claim to be the best NFT developers and guarantee they can deliver the best solution. Well-established or recently founded companies, experienced or ambitious, local or foreign, large or small, high-priced or cheap have so many parameters to consider. No wonder that such an enormous selection may confuse not only startupers, but also experienced entrepreneurs.

The most common misunderstandings, such as 'high price equals good quality' or 'young companies are not experienced enough to deliver high-quality products', may lead to failure or unnecessary expenses. Keeping that in mind, let's return to unbiased analysis of NFT marketplace's development costs. Our first stop is looking at the cost of building an NFT marketplace from the standpoint of hourly fees.

It's not a secret that the average cost of NFT marketplace development varies depending on geographical location so let's have a brief look at the table:

How much does it cost to make an NFT marketplace: hourly rates worldwide;

It is weird to realize that the highest-priced NFT marketplace developer in the US charges $150 an hour, while the best one in India is 6x cheaper.

How much does an NFT marketplace development cost to create: Time and money issues

To answer this question we need to know that not all NFT marketplaces are equal. And the inequality is not only in the platform that it is developed for. The lowdown of NFT marketplace development is counted with the time needed to implement certain NFT marketplace features. So let's create a classification based on the moderate time needed.

• A basic NFT marketplace with simple functionality requires approximately 500-800 development hours and takes around 3-6 months to develop.
• A medium complexity NFT marketplace takes from 800-1200 hours and can take from 5 to 9 months to develop .
• A complex time-consuming app in most cases exceeds 1200 hours and takes from 8 months and more to develop.

What affects NFT marketplace development costs?

When you set out to develop an NFT marketplace, you cannot expect your NFT development company to inform you about the development costs right off the bat. They need to analyze your initial requirements first. Surely before you will be sent a quote, the team of developers will estimate how many hours were required to implement your specifications.

The most significant factors that affect NFT development costs are:

• Project type ( NFT Marketplace, NFT exchange marketplace, NFT minting website, NFT Renting marketplace, NFT launchpad etc.)
• Token Type
• Customization of visual design (template or custom)
• NFT Features and functionality
• Platforms (MERN, MEAN)
• Backend infrastructure and NFT admin dashboard
• Location and structure of a development team
• NFT marketplace maintenance costs and additional services
• NFT development vendor's hourly rates

Based on this information, any NFT development vendor can make a rough estimate of your project

Now, let’s focus on some of these aspects.

Features and Functionality

To know the answer to the question: 'What does it cost to create an NFT marketplace?', you should find out how complex the NFT marketplace you are about to develop is. Functionality, as well as number and the complexity of implemented features are the biggest cost drivers in NFT marketplace development. Screens, buttons, fields involved, the amount of logic required matter a lot.

Well then, it's time to discover what features influence the complexity of the whole NFT marketplace. As we mentioned before, implementation of some features can be significantly lengthy, while others are relatively short and simple. Depending on the complexity of solutions, developers need to use third-party API or code from scratch. Simpler solutions, in turn, require standard instruments and engage native features.

Let’s take a look at the approximate NFT development time and cost required for basic features and then move forward to more complex ones.

How much does it cost to build a NFT marketplace: Breakdown by basic features

Additionally, quite often you may introduce some unexpected changes during the NFT marketplace development process. That's why you need to take such costs into account and plan the budget with an added expense line.

Customization of Visual Design

Creating a unique user interface design is a complicated deed that provides additional expenses to your project. The cheaper variant suggests using OS-supplied items and building screens of standard elements. The quantity of screens is also a determining factor.

Platforms

Are you thinking of creating an NFT marketplace? Maybe your NFT marketplace is meant to work on MERN as well? So, you should know the cost and benefits of creating a MERN technology stack. Making a decision on which platform to start from, business owners try to take into consideration such factors as MERN and other platforms' market, device fragmentation and prevalence, but the most meaningful is that developing NFT marketplace for these platforms differs greatly. These platforms take over different programming languages, have different SDKs and utilize different development tools.

The question comes up: is there any price difference in developing the NFT marketplace for MERN or other technology stack? Actually, no. In case you are creating an NFT marketplace with MERN or other technology stack, there is no significant price discrepancy in the costs of creating an NFT marketplace. But if you want your NFT marketplace to support web apps and mobile apps, get ready to pay more money for development.

Marketplace Infrastructure and Administration

In NFT marketplace development, that provides developers with ABIs to provide data exchange between a frontend and a blockchain explorer. In order to track user activity and assess the performance of your NFT marketplace application, it is equipped with analytics. Depending on the number of parameters you are going to track and how detailed and specific the tracking will be, costs vary.

The administration panel is surely a very useful tool for managing NFT sales analytics content, users and statistics. There are options to adopt existing admin panel templates for your needs, but finding a good one is a problem. So it makes sense to create an adequate panel to meet your business requirements.

Location and Structure of a Development Team

As mentioned earlier, the location of your NFT development team is a vital factor influencing the product’s final price. The cost of creating an NFT marketplace in the UK will differ from the cost of NFT marketplace development in the US and other regions.

Development Cost of Famous NFT Marketplace Startups

We've selected several well-known NFT marketplace startups that got funding in a seed round to continue developing their products. These real-life examples may give you more understanding of NFT marketplace development prices.

Opensea - The company received $200K in seed funding for implementing their ideas.

Rarible - This community-owned NFT marketplace has proven quite successful for the company as it has helped them generate over $35M in yearly revenue.

Mintable - It is an Ethereum-powered marketplace where users can mint and trade their digital tokens. It has helped them to generate over $13M in series A.

Spores - It is a cross-chain, DeFi-powered NFT ecosystem. It has a market cap of around $3M, gives life to the ecosystem by making it easy to fractionalize, mint, manage and trade NFTs.