How Much Money Should I Keep Back for App Marketing?

A property management company spent eighty-five grand building a tenant portal app that handled everything from maintenance requests to rent payments, the interface was clean and the features worked exactly as promised, but they kept back just three thousand pounds for marketing because they assumed their existing tenants would naturally download it... six months after launch they had a seven percent adoption rate and the app sat largely unused because nobody really knew it existed or understood why they should bother switching from email and phone calls.

Most app projects fail not because the product was poorly built but because the team ran out of money to tell anyone about it

The question of how much to keep back for marketing comes up in probably half the initial consultations I have with clients, and the answers people expect are usually way off from what actually works in practice. You see someone with a fifty thousand pound development budget and they're thinking maybe five grand for marketing should do it, when the reality is that user acquisition often costs more than the build itself over the first year. I've watched this play out dozens of times now, where brilliant apps with proper funding for development end up dying quietly because the marketing budget was an afterthought rather than a core part of the financial planning. The tricky bit is that marketing spend isn't a one-time cost like development can be, it's an ongoing expense that needs to keep flowing until your app reaches a point where organic growth and word of mouth can carry some of the weight... and getting to that point takes longer and costs more than most people budget for.

What Actually Happens When You Launch Without Marketing Money

The app goes live on both stores and for about three days there's excitement because your team downloads it, maybe some friends and family do too, and you see those first twenty or thirty installs tick up on your dashboard. Week two is quieter. Week three you're checking the numbers less often because they're barely moving. By week six you've got maybe a hundred users if you're lucky, most of whom opened the app once and never came back, and the reality starts to sink in that nobody is just stumbling across your app by accident. The app stores are packed with millions of apps and without active promotion yours is completely invisible, sitting somewhere on page forty-seven of search results that nobody will ever scroll to. What really stings is watching the review requests go out to your tiny user base and getting nothing back because you need volume to generate reviews, and without reviews your store listing looks unproven which makes the few people who do find you less likely to download.

I worked with a fitness coaching app that launched with zero marketing budget, they were convinced the app would spread through gym communities naturally, but after four months they had three hundred users across two cities and the growth had completely flatlined. We had to go back and secure additional funding just to give the app a fighting chance, starting the marketing effort six months late which meant rebuilding momentum from scratch instead of capitalising on launch energy.

The Real Numbers Behind User Acquisition Costs

User acquisition in the finance sector runs between eight and fifteen quid per install if you're running paid campaigns on Facebook and Google, and that's just to get someone to download your app, not to actually use it or become a paying customer. Healthcare apps sit in a similar range, usually seven to twelve pounds per install depending on how targeted your audience needs to be. E-commerce and retail apps can get cheaper, sometimes down to three or four quid per install, but the conversion rates from install to purchase are lower so you need more volume. Gaming apps often run campaigns at ninety-nine pence to two quid per install but the lifetime value calculations are completely different because they're banking on in-app purchases from a small percentage of users. The numbers shift constantly based on competition, time of year, and what platforms you're using, but the baseline truth is that organic growth alone won't cut it for most apps in their first year.

• Finance and banking apps: £8-15 per install
• Healthcare and medical apps: £7-12 per install
• E-commerce and retail apps: £3-6 per install
• Education and learning apps: £4-8 per install
• Entertainment and lifestyle apps: £2-5 per install
• Gaming apps: £0.99-2 per install

Track your cost per install alongside your activation rate (users who complete a key action) and retention rate (users who return after one week) to understand your true acquisition costs, because a cheap install that never converts is worth less than a pricier install that becomes an active user.

A healthcare booking app I worked on was spending nine pounds per install through targeted Facebook campaigns aimed at people who had recently searched for medical services, but only thirty percent of those installs ever completed the registration process and just twelve percent made an actual booking. When you work backwards from those numbers the real cost per converted customer was closer to seventy-five pounds, which changed the entire conversation about budget allocation and lifetime value requirements.

How Platform Fees and App Store Presence Affect Your Budget

Apple takes thirty percent of any revenue you generate through in-app purchases or subscriptions in the first year (dropping to fifteen percent after twelve months for subscriptions), and Google Play has the same structure, which means your revenue projections need to account for losing nearly a third of your gross income right off the top. Developer accounts cost ninety-nine dollars per year for Apple and a one-time twenty-five dollar fee for Google, which is negligible, but if you're paying for app store optimisation tools to track your keyword rankings and monitor competitor performance you're looking at anywhere from fifty to three hundred quid monthly depending on the service. Some apps invest in professional app store listing optimisation, getting help with screenshots, preview videos, and description copy, which can run between two and eight thousand pounds as a one-time cost but makes a measurable difference in conversion rates from page views to installs.

The preview videos are worth calling out separately because they can increase conversion rates by twenty to thirty percent according to Apple's own data, but producing a good one that follows platform guidelines and actually showcases your app's value takes proper planning. I've seen companies try to film these in-house and end up with something that looks amateur compared to competitor listings, which actually hurts rather than helps.

Splitting Your Budget Between Pre-Launch and Post-Launch

The split that tends to work best is about twenty-five to thirty percent of your total marketing budget going to pre-launch activities and the remaining seventy to seventy-five percent reserved for post-launch user acquisition and retention... though this assumes you have enough total budget to actually split in the first place. Pre-launch money goes toward building your landing page and email list, setting up your social media presence, maybe running some teaser campaigns to build an email list of interested users, and getting your press materials together if you're planning any media outreach. The goal isn't to spend heavily before launch but to have the infrastructure ready so you can turn on campaigns the moment the app goes live, because launch momentum is real and wasting that first week scrambling to set up ad accounts and create campaign assets means missing your best window for initial traction.

The apps that succeed are the ones that treat launch day as the start of marketing rather than the end of development

Post-launch is where the bulk of your spend needs to happen, running paid acquisition campaigns, testing different messaging and creative approaches, optimising your cost per install, and then layering in retention campaigns to bring back users who've gone dormant. A booking platform I worked with spent four grand on pre-launch (landing page, email list building, social setup) and kept back twenty-eight thousand for the first six months post-launch, which gave them enough runway to test channel performance, identify what worked, and scale up the winners without running out of money halfway through. They ended up finding that Google App Campaigns performed better than Facebook for their audience, but they only discovered that through testing, and testing requires budget to burn through while you're learning.

What Retention Marketing Actually Costs to Run Properly

Getting someone to install your app is one thing but getting them to actually use it regularly is another beast entirely, and retention marketing is where a lot of projects underestimate the ongoing costs involved. Push notification infrastructure is usually baked into your development costs, but if you want sophisticated segmentation and personalised messaging you're probably paying for a service like OneSignal or Braze, which starts free for small user bases but scales up to hundreds of pounds monthly once you pass a few thousand users. Email marketing for re-engagement campaigns adds another twenty to two hundred quid monthly depending on your list size and how often you're sending. In-app messaging and personalisation tools can run anywhere from fifty to five hundred quid monthly depending on the features you need. Then there's the content creation side of retention, if you're running a content-driven app you need someone producing that content regularly, and if you're running promotional campaigns to bring users back you need creative assets and copy for those campaigns.

The retention budget should account for around twenty to thirty percent of your ongoing marketing spend because the cost of re-engaging an existing user is typically one-fifth to one-tenth the cost of acquiring a new one... which makes retention math work out really well if you can get it right. A subscription-based learning app I worked on was spending about two grand monthly on retention marketing (email campaigns, push notifications, in-app promotions) and that spend was keeping their churn rate at about four percent monthly instead of the seven or eight percent they saw when they paused retention efforts to save money. The difference in revenue over six months was substantial enough that the retention marketing more than paid for itself.

Testing and Iteration Money That People Forget to Include

You launch with your best guess about messaging, target audience, creative approach, and channel mix, but you won't actually know what works until you test it with real users spending real money on real campaigns. Testing means running multiple ad variations, trying different audience segments, experimenting with bidding strategies, and sometimes discovering that your entire positioning was off and needs rethinking. This burns through budget that doesn't directly result in efficient user acquisition because you're paying to learn, not just paying to acquire. I usually recommend keeping back about fifteen to twenty percent of your total marketing budget as pure testing money, budget that you expect to spend less efficiently while you're figuring out what resonates and what falls flat.

The testing phase typically runs for the first two to three months post-launch, though it never really stops completely because markets shift and creative fatigue sets in over time. A delivery app we built went through about six thousand pounds in the first eight weeks just testing different value propositions in ad copy (fast delivery versus wide selection versus low fees) across different audience segments before we found the combination that brought cost per install down to acceptable levels. That six grand looked like wasted spend on the spreadsheet but it was the price of finding the approach that made the remaining budget work twice as hard.

Set up proper attribution tracking from day one so you can see which campaigns and channels are driving not just installs but actual usage and conversions, because optimising for cheap installs without tracking post-install behavior leads to spending money on users who never stick around.

Building a Marketing Budget That Matches Your App Category

A gaming app with a freemium model needs high volume at low cost per install because revenue comes from a small percentage of users who make in-app purchases, so the marketing budget might be fifty to seventy-five percent of total project costs spread over twelve months. A business-to-business software app with a subscription model can work with lower install volumes but needs higher quality targeting, so marketing might be thirty to forty percent of project costs but concentrated differently. E-commerce apps need to balance customer acquisition costs against average order values and repeat purchase rates, usually landing around forty to fifty percent of budget going to marketing. Healthcare and finance apps face higher acquisition costs but often higher lifetime values too, so marketing budget might run forty to sixty percent of overall spend.

The percentages shift based on whether you have existing brand recognition, distribution channels, or user bases to leverage... a company launching an app for their existing customers needs less marketing budget than a startup launching to cold audiences. The booking platform I mentioned earlier was a new brand, so they needed the full marketing push, but I've worked with established retailers adding apps who could get away with twenty percent marketing budgets because they had email lists and in-store promotion channels already. Some apps also implement referral programmes to supplement their paid acquisition efforts, though these still require budget for incentives and management.

Creating Your Marketing Reserve Based on Real Project Data

If someone comes to me with a forty thousand pound app development budget, I'm usually suggesting they need at least another twenty-five to thirty-five grand set aside for marketing in year one, with the understanding that this might need topping up depending on how acquisition costs play out in practice. That marketing budget needs to cover pre-launch setup, three to six months of active user acquisition, retention marketing infrastructure, testing and optimisation, and ongoing content or creative production. For a seventy-five thousand pound development project, marketing budget should be pushing fifty to sixty grand for year one. For a fifteen thousand pound simple app, you're still looking at ten to fifteen grand minimum for marketing unless you have other distribution advantages.

The apps that have done well are the ones where marketing budget was planned from the start as a core requirement rather than something to figure out later, and where the team understood that the development cost was just the entry fee to building something but the marketing cost was the price of making it succeed. This is often where I see teams make common planning mistakes that derail entire projects. I've turned down projects where the client had budget for development but nothing meaningful for marketing because I've seen how that story ends too many times, and it's better to be honest up front than to build something that never finds its audience. The ratio that keeps coming up across different projects and categories is roughly one-to-one between development and first-year marketing, sometimes tilting more toward marketing for competitive categories... and that ratio surprises people but it reflects the reality of how much it costs to get attention in a saturated market where users have endless options.

Understanding what your first year budget should realistically include is crucial for proper planning. Many companies also underestimate the importance of having proper app store assets ready before launch day, which can significantly impact conversion rates and reduce your effective marketing costs. If you're working through the numbers on your own app project and want someone to sense-check your budget split or talk through what marketing spend looks like for your specific category and target audience, get in touch and we can walk through it together based on what we've seen work across similar projects.

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