How Much Does It Cost To Build An App Like Luno?

The app development landscape in Africa is exciting and challenging, especially for financial apps like Luno. With its fast-growing user base seeking digital financial services, Africa is home to three key tech hubs—Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa—where mobile penetration is soaring. However, building an app for the African market involves much more than simple coding and design. The unique technological challenges—limited connectivity, data constraints, and low-cost smartphone usage—demand strategies tailored to African users’ preferences.

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Compared to other regions, many African users rely heavily on mobile devices due to limited access to desktops. Subsequently, apps performing well in mobile-first, low-bandwidth, and low-power-consumption settings are valuable and essential. Apps like Luno, designed for cryptocurrency trading and investment, must succeed in environments where users may be experiencing fluctuating or poor mobile connectivity, inconsistent electricity, and varying access to payment gateways and banking systems.

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Countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa present a wealth of opportunity for financial apps—so long as app development decisions are tailored to these local realities. Investing in these regions, particularly in custom app development, means building highly localized platforms, significantly impacting overall app development costs.

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Platform and Device Compatibility Across Africa

When considering how much it costs to build an app like Luno for the African market, platform, and device compatibility rank high on the priority list. Android dominates the African smartphone market. Countries like South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria rely on low-cost Android phones, often with limited processing power and storage capacity compared to mid-range and premium smartphones. This is critical in shaping the app development cost because optimizing for such devices requires additional time and resource considerations.

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For an app like Luno, where users depend on real-time data for cryptocurrency trading and transactions, optimizing for low-end devices means ensuring that the app can deliver smooth performance under constrained conditions. Please do so to ensure good user engagement and app effectiveness. To maintain market relevance, developers working on such apps must ensure that basic functionality can run smoothly on these devices without taxing their minimal system resources.

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Considering Africa’s inconsistent internet access, deploying apps using progressive web app (PWA) technologies or lightweight mobile-first apps becomes essential. PWAs perform even in low-bandwidth areas, requiring less mobile data. Additionally, developers should prioritize ensuring that these apps can handle off-network functions for users who intermittently lose data connectivity.

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Focusing custom app development on device compatibility suited to African conditions may increase costs compared to building for non-African markets. However, this approach ensures more extensive user adoption and fosters retention in the technologically diverse African landscape.

Design and User Experience (UX/UI) in the African Context 

User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design for apps like Luno in Africa need to focus on simplicity and efficiency when it comes to performance and intuitive flows adapted to the unique needs of African users. Given that mobile networks in Africa can be unreliable, apps focusing on low bandwidth usage will perform considerably better on the continent. Developers must implement designs that rely on smaller data packets exchanging information with lower latency—crucial for real-time crypto transactions.

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A clutter-free UI is another key requirement in Africa’s telecom environments, where users expect fast load times. Incorporating solutions tailored to African connection speeds (2G in many rural areas and 3G in urban peripheries) will balance performance and cost optimization during the app development cycle. Furthermore, localization in terms of language preferences (e.g., Kiswahili in East Africa, Pidgin in Nigeria) and visual elements that resonate with regional users adds another layer to the design costs but are invaluable for user engagement.

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With African audiences also skewing young and mobile-first, certain social-sharing features within the app and onboarding designed to minimize friction (e.g., simple step-by-step wizards) are vital considerations for gaining user trust.

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Integrations with Third-Party Services/External Systems 

For an app like Luno to operate smoothly in Africa, it must integrate with various third-party services across different countries. These include payment gateways such as M-Pesa (Kenya and Tanzania), Airtel Money (available in multiple countries), Paga in Nigeria, and MTN Mobile Money, which are used across several African nations. Each payment solution has unique system rules and security measures, requiring detailed, often complex integration that adds to the development timeline and cost.

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Beyond payments, many African users navigate low-internet or no-internet scenarios, so developers may need to utilize SMS-based integrations or USSD technology. These offer users basic financial transactions via simple text messages, bypassing the need for data altogether. However, these integrations are unique from region to region, making including such infrastructure costly when targeting multiple African markets.

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Database and Backend Infrastructure 

The backend infrastructure for an app like Luno in Africa must consider regions with low connectivity constraints while being flexible enough to accommodate offline database access and sync mechanisms—where offline data input must be saved and later synced when the user regains internet access. This brings unique challenges in file size optimization, data storage methods, and efficient caching solutions.

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Moreover, implementing highly scalable cloud infrastructure is essential to prevent downtimes or system failures due to erratic power conditions in certain parts of Africa. Localized server farms and cloud technologies offered by global giants like AWS and Microsoft Azure have expanded into the continent, which helps reduce latency and improve reliability for users spread across the developing cities of Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi.

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Ongoing Maintenance and Updates 

Once an app like Luno is live, ongoing maintenance becomes an essential recurring cost, especially in Africa, where diverse infrastructures require continual adaptations. Regular updates, testing, and troubleshooting ensure that the app remains usable under varying internet access, hardware, and power reliability conditions.

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Mobile carrier fragmentation and inconsistent internet reliability further complicate maintenance in Africa. With users accessing data via various mobile carriers or working with offline features, developers must regularly track and optimize the app for compatibility, ensure that bug fixes are rolled out in diverse regions, and iterate designs based on how user issues arise in specific local contexts.

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Moreover, with changing cryptocurrency regulations across African markets, the Luno app must continuously update payment channel compatibility, transaction regulations, and security protocols tied to new government mandates. This form of ongoing compliance maintenance represents a distinct ongoing cost.

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Lastly, the growth of data infrastructure in Africa presents challenges and opportunities. As more users move to 4G and 5G networks, developers may have to release new, optimized app versions to take advantage of the latest technologies while ensuring that previous versions are backward-compatible for those still on older systems.

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Team Expertise and Location 

Africa's tech talent pool has significantly grown in recent years, especially in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, which are known for producing high-quality developers specializing in mobile-first and custom app development. Hiring locally has many upsides, as African developers possess an astute understanding of data constraints, infrastructure reliability, and local regulations—critical factors in determining the app's practicality for African end-users.

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For example, local developers, often stationed out of Lagos or Nairobi, have hands-on experience addressing African consumer behaviors and designing data-conscious apps. They bring unique know-how on integrating fintech options and developing frugal app solutions to provide maximum results with limited resources.

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However, deciding whether to hire local developers or outsource to international teams impacts costs significantly. International experts may charge higher fees, especially when unfamiliar with localized issues (e.g., handling M-Pesa integrations or understanding local telecom infrastructures). However, depending on the app's ultimate goals, the decision to work with purely African talent or a blend of local and international contractors can balance cost and expertise.

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Finding teams experienced in low-latency design and adept at constructing offline features (for regions with poor connectivity) significantly impacts app development costs. Still, it may result in future savings and a more successful product.

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Hidden Costs & Miscellaneous Factors

Data and Connectivity Constraints: As most rely on 3G or intermittent 4G, developers of apps like Luno have to account for the connectivity hardships users encounter. The cost of ensuring functionalities that can operate in offline or low-speed environments suddenly becomes more apparent, requiring optimization features such as synchronization mechanisms, data compression, and progressive web technology. As more mobile users move to 4G networks, ensuring future scalability adds incremental but necessary costs.

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Mobile Payment Integration: Each African country typically has a preferred local payment provider, like M-Pesa in Kenya or Airtel Money in parts of East Africa. Integrating multiple mobile money platforms often requires working with fragmented APIs, adding to development complexities and costs. Additionally, ensuring compliance with each provider’s security standards and sometimes governing transaction limits impacts the initial development and subsequent management.

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Legal and Compliance Considerations: With Africa’s fintech regulations constantly evolving, legal and compliance costs are rising. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in South Africa, for example, ensures strict data protection practices, which require legal advice, strict development protocols, and ongoing audits that will inflate app development costs. Other regulatory frameworks in Nigeria, such as cryptocurrency restrictions, require ongoing amendments to stay current.

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What Makes the Financial App Category (Luno) Unique in Terms of Development for Africa?

Financial apps such as Luno present unique challenges that vastly differ when developing for African markets instead of Europe or Asia. One key reason is Africa’s fast-growing but highly fragmented financial infrastructure. While there’s enormous demand for efficient and accessible financial services—especially for investments and trading in digital currencies—each country approaches mobile money, fiat, and cryptocurrency in very different ways, and each market often uses different payment gateways that must continually be updated as new players emerge.

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Additionally, African governments are increasingly regulating cryptocurrency usage and taxation, meaning any app facilitating crypto trading must be agile enough to adapt to new legal frameworks in Africa’s most populous nations, such as Kenya and Nigeria. These legal frameworks may differ significantly across regions, impacting app cost and complexity.

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Apps like Luno must account for the urban/rural technological divide to operate successfully in Africa. While fintech services are highly appreciated in metropolitan areas like Lagos or Johannesburg, rural penetration is slower due to less internet reliability and lower cryptocurrency use. Hence, apps must be designed to have offline features accessible wherever payment processing is impossible in real time.

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Mobile payment systems are built on local financial ecosystems, such as Mobile Money, not bank accounts or credit card networks. Hence, Luno must smoothly integrate localized currency systems alongside global crypto marketplaces—considerations not present in established markets like Europe or North America. These structural differences require diligent planning during custom app development, driving up costs accordingly.

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Want to bring a mobile-centric, scalable app to the African market? 

At Scrums.com, we understand the specific demands across African regions, from payment solutions to optimizing apps for low connectivity zones. Let's discuss a custom estimate for your app designed with African users in mind! Get a free consultation with our African market experts today.