Yelp has grown tremendously in the last year, generating $713 million in sales. Since its humble beginnings as a simple website, it’s grown into a multibillion-dollar organization and a go-to resource for businesses of all sizes. For this reason, it established the Yelp Mobile App, and currently, more than 70% of its traffic comes from mobile devices. To advertise businesses, several are now attempting to build a yelp app.
Before delving into the question of Yelp app development companies, it’s worth taking a moment to define what Yelp is and what it accomplishes. Most of the time, it’s a tool that helps you navigate city attractions by providing ratings and user reviews. Yelp’s mobile app has made it an even more powerful tool, taking full advantage of GPS. Customers are able to look up nearby businesses in a matter of seconds. Recently, the Yelp app has been bolstered with an augmented reality function.
What is Yelp?
The Yelp app was launched in 2004 and today has more than 142 million users. Users can use the app to identify local companies based on reviews and ratings left by other customers, such as a pizzeria, motel, or retail store.
In order to show establishments in the immediate area, Yelp relies on geolocation data. Filtering the results or defining specific business categories like markets, stores, and cafes can be done by users of the service. The search results can then be sorted by distance, price, and rating using the app. There are then details such as the business location, phone number, and working hours displayed on Yelp, as well as reviews from customers.
The app’s users can see the route to the specified location on their mobile devices. If a customer has an account with the app, they are able to submit feedback for the establishment.
Let’s move on from here.
The Yelp app includes the following features
Navigation, travel, lifestyle, or food and drink apps all fall into this category. All of those categories are covered by Yelp, and that is what makes it stand out. The primary features are required to build an app like Yelp:
- Reviews: User reviews of venues, services, food, and general experiences at tourist destinations are written and checked. In addition, a scale of 1 to 5 stars is provided.
- Search nearby: If you have a mobile device with GPS, you can open the app and search for nearby businesses and services. Additionally, you can search by category, as well as search for a specific word or phrase.
- Directions: A geo-location tool that provides users with information about the location, such as the address, hours of operation, and images.
- Menus: The ability to see the current menu of a restaurant or cafe is a nice perk.
- Photos: User evaluations can be added to photos, and photos can be viewed by clicking on a location or a service.
- Check-ins: When you are in a specific location, you may use the check-in feature to share your location with friends and followers.
Yelp’s Most Advanced Features
However, in order to create a Yelp-like website or app that is both profitable and multifunctional, you must include features such as social sign-in, reservations, media files, purchases, messenger, and other similar functionality.
Admin Panel: Administrators can log in here. Your project’s admin panel is a critical component. There should be a content management system (CMS) that allows for editing information, managing services, and so on from the admin panel.
Yelp Reputation System: Yelp’s key competitive edge is its reputation system. The app’s users will be able to get a clear picture of businesses and services thanks to its assistance.
Getting the highest in-app rating is difficult for businesses. First and foremost, customers are more likely to talk about their bad experiences than their good ones. Secondly, Yelp’s review filters are the key.
Create the user module, the communication module parts, and social integration to construct an app like Yelp. Here is a list of Yelp features in a simple table.
Businesses can also take advantage of some of Yelp’s features. For example, premium alliances or the opportunity to reply directly to consumer feedback. Consider this side of Yelp development if you want to build a Yelp clone mobile app.
Yelp-like app’s technology stack
In order to create a similar app, wouldn’t it make sense to study Yelp’s technology? Project duration may be impacted, although not by Yelp costs per se. Yelp leverages the LAMP stack – an open-source framework for building web applications – as a starting point. Included are:
- Linux Ubuntu
- Apache
- MySQL, the Percona fork
- Python/PHP
They choose SQL because of its simplicity and scalability when working with data. There are some new features available with the Percona build that help with performance. A small number of data sets are maintained by Yelp’s near-hundred data servers. Yelp uses a MySQLdb connector for Python. There are a variety of tools available to monitor MySQL performance, including:
- Nagios
- Sensu
- Graphite
- Percona Toolkit
- Grafana
Yelp also supports load balancing with LVS and HAProxy. They utilize Facebook Scribe to keep track of their social media activity. The real-time streaming data architecture of Yelp has to handle millions of messages and updates. As long as Yelp uses Salesforce as a CRM system, Salesforce Connector is used to connect to Salesforce. The Apache Kafka communications system is used in conjunction with it.
The essentials have been covered; it’s time to move on. Here’s more information regarding a Yelp clone mobile app.
Cost Components of the Yelp application
Let’s take a closer look at the Yelp app’s pricing. There are several steps involved in creating an app like Yelp, including the backend, mobile platform programming, design/UX, a web application (if desired), and testing. The way you develop an app affects the price to build a Yelp app. Using a mobile app development company is a better option than doing it yourself or hiring android developers. There is no doubt about that.
Our Yelp cost estimate is based on hiring a development firm. Rates can range from $25 to $150 per hour, according to online searches. For the sake of efficiency, we’ll take the average $50 per hour rate to build a yelp app clone. For the development of a navigation app, it is necessary to consider the following factors:
- User profile/authentication
- Geolocation
- Reviews/ratings/recommendations
- Push notifications
Building a Yelp-like app is expected to take six months. The user module, which comprises registration, login, and the main panel, would take around 1500 hours to develop. It also has the activity/feed panel, search/browse screen, and bookmarks. Finally, make reservations if you’re using Yelp.
Building the communication element would take 500 hours. This service includes messaging, push notifications, Yelp API, and location service. A Yelp clone app may include Facebook API, Google Maps, and bespoke animations and views. And those might take up to 500 hours to develop.
As a result, the time required to build a yelp app clone will be around 2500 hours. But that’s not all. The Yelp app cost is simply the cost of producing an app for Android and iOS. Designers, quality assurance, and the backend should not be ignored.
In the backend
Like Yelp, we could utilize HTML5 and Python to create a mobile app similar to theirs. jQuery is used for HTML scripting, and Django is used as a Python framework. To build a Yelp app for Android smartphones, Google Maps API is another crucial service.
The app should be able to take a user’s position, search in that area (or depending on parameters), and display the results on a map. Sure, Yelp uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). Applications with high traffic benefit substantially from AWS EC2 and ELB. Smaller apps may not require it at first, but there should be adequate capacity to support them.
The backend architecture of Yelp can be summarized as follows:
- To build a backend that has the least impact on the Yelp app’s cost, developers will need at least 200 hours.
The estimated total cost to build a yelp app
As previously said, we need to multiply the $50 rate by the total of all components and development time. Also, keep in mind that this is only an estimate based on a median hourly charge to build a yelp app. The way you build an app like Yelp could be completely different from mine. However, if you’ve done some research on the Yelp app, our cost estimate may serve as a reference.
How much does a Yelp-like app typically cost to develop? So, the answer is somewhere about $145,000. It may be too low for some, but it may be too high for others. Competing with Yelp in this market could be difficult due to the fact that they have done something unique with their mobile app.
According to the Yelp example, one can locate a variety of useful tools and implement them into their own business or mobile app. As an alternative, you may create a simple navigational app for a single type of establishment, such as shopping malls. Alternatively, you may create a mobile app that provides a local restaurant guide and reservations.
Conclusion
Sharing experiences and exploring new locations are two of the most popular pastimes for people. So, online directories like Yelp will continue to be popular for a while. Yelp makes a lot of money from its users by using a variety of monetization models.
As a result, you should think to build a yelp app clone or yelp a website for your new business. We can also assist you in finding a Yelp app development team to carry out the project.