How to Create a Pregnancy Tracking App Like BabyCenter

Pregnancy Tracker Apps Market

In 2021, the woman’s health app market was valued at $2.7 billion, and it’s expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.45% from 2022 to 2030. The demand for remote healthcare and the popularity of smartphones are the main drivers of this growth.

Pregnancy tracking apps are one of the most popular categories in all women’s health applications. Currently, the app market offers multiple pregnancy tracker apps. Let’s talk about them in detail.

Best pregnancy apps 2023

Pregnancy+

Pregnancy+ has lots of information about each stage of pregnancy and offers daily articles, guides on breastfeeding, exercises, and more. Its most interesting feature is a 3D model rendering of a baby’s development, that allows users to see all the details. Pregnancy+ offers pregnancy-planning tools like birth plans, appointment calendars, and more.

Pregnancy and Baby tracker: WTE

This app has a great visual design and a clean interface. It compares current baby size to fun things like movie props and items from the 80s and 90s. It also has 3D renderings of a baby, articles about its development, and changes that happen to a woman’s body during pregnancy. This app is notorious for its social media features, which offer group chats for users that have their babies in the same month.

Nurture Pregnancy Week by Week (Glow)

Glow is an app for people who experienced a previous pregnancy loss and need extra support to navigate their next pregnancies. The Nurture Pregnancy Week by Week offers miscarriage support, and also has social and partner support features. It has lots of information on health data and symptoms that allow users to make sure their pregnancy is going just fine. This application also has integrations with Apple’s Health app and MyFinessPal for collecting more health information.

Ovia Pregnancy Tracker

The Ovia Pregnancy Tracker has lots of personalized features that demonstrate the anatomical development of the user’s baby, 3D renderings of their bodies, health-related articles, medication tools, and more. Ovia collects lots of data about fetal movement, nutrition, and more. It helps users to manage their doctor appointments.

BabyCenter app business model

BabyCenter is a media company whose mission is to provide comprehensive and reliable information on everything concerning conception, pregnancy, birth, and childcare. They have by far the biggest pool of medically approved materials on these subjects including articles, print materials, and videos.

BabyCenter’s mobile application has many useful features. It’s available on both Android and iOS and is focused on conception and pregnancy. However, it also provides lots of information about infant care. The mobile apps are compatible not only with smartphones but also with iPads and Android tablets.

How does BabyCenter make money? It is fully powered by ads. The BabyCenter app is completely free for its users, and has no in-app purchases available. What it does have is high engagement and over 100 million active users that read their articles and enter the app at least several times a week.

The application consists of three major sections: a calendar, a forum, and tools. We’ll analyze the features in each of these sections.

Pregnancy Tracker App Features

Calendar

The calendar is the most visually interesting part of this app. Let’s explore it.

Week tracker

On the main screen, users can see a timer showing how many weeks have passed since conception and how many days are left until the due date. Comparing the current size of the baby with seeds, fruit, and vegetables is a nice touch.

News feed

The news feed provides articles that can be useful during pregnancy. It also includes videos, quizzes, and polls that give both users and app owners valuable information about the app’s audience.
Users can also find expert advice in the news feed.

Forum

The forum allows users to share their experiences and ask for advice from other platform users. This feature includes the ability to create new topics, add comments, and attach media files.

All topics are sorted into groups, and users can search for specific questions to see what others have already written on an issue.

The application also suggests topics and articles related to the current topic of discussion.

Tools

In our opinion, the tools are the most interesting part of this application. Unlike a timer or a forum — features that can be present on a website — some tools in BabyCenter are mobile-specific, like trackers and a photo gallery.

There are two kinds of tools: for users who are trying to conceive and for those who are already pregnant.

Getting pregnant tools

Getting pregnant tools were added to the application not so long ago, and they provide personal information.

• Ovulation calculator
• Due date calculator

These are rather simple tools that count a certain number of days according to your inputs.

Pregnancy tools

Kick tracker

Registry checklist

Registry checklist shows everything a soon-to-be-mother needs in the hospital in order to have a safe and comfortable birthing experience.

Baby names

Birth class

Birth preferences

Contraction timer

Is It Safe tool

General features

There are also some standard features that allow user to manage the app and personalize it according to their preferences. General features include:

• Personal profiles
• Settings
• Social sharing
• Push notifications

Users can only adjust settings for push notifications, measurements, and email subscriptions. However, it’s more than enough for this app.

These are the most useful features in the BabyCenter application. Currently, BabyCenter has over 10 million downloads on Google Play, and it uses mobile advertising monetization without any paid content to sustain itself and bring profit to its creators.

Main steps of creating a pregnancy tracker app

Let me walk you through the process of building a pregnancy tracker application.

Step 1. Find your niche

There are lots of successful pregnancy tracker applications, so you need to find what will make your app different from your competitors. Conduct a competitor research, find a specific need of your target audience, perform market analysis and a SWOT analysis. If you don’t know how to approach this, you can ask for help from your vendor. For example, at Mobindustry all this research is a part of a discovery phase, where we define your business goals and requirements, and plan the development of your future app.

Step 2. Find a reliable vendor

If you don’t have your own in-house development team, you need to find developers who will create an application for you. Here are some ways to make sure your vendor is reliable:

• ask for recommendations from your partners who’ve already built apps for their businesses
• check the listing resources like Clutch.co and Goodfirms for reviews
• review the portfolio on your potential vendor’s website
• choose a vendor and go through a discovery phase with them, to find out how well they understand your needs, communicate and solve issues

After you’ve found a vendor, it’s time to start the development.

Step 3. Develop and test your app

The development and testing processes happen almost simultaneously, as the code is being checked right after it has been developed. The development process is divided into milestones usually, and after each milestone, you review the project with your development team and make improvements for the next sprint. After the app is done and checked, it’s time for the release.

Step 4. Release and improve your app

After the release to the app markets, it’s time to pay attention to your users’ responses. Use that feedback to further improve and develop your application. Usually, we advise you to start with an MVP, as it allows you to enter the market as soon as possible, and then develop the app further using the real-world feedback from your target audience. This way you won’t spend too much money and effort on something that may not be necessary for your TA.

Now let’s see how much it might cost to create an app for parents with similar features.

How much does it cost to create an app for pregnancy and parenting?

The cost of childcare application development depends heavily on your core idea, supported devices, and of course the hourly rate of the developers you hire for the project. The hourly rate usually depends on the location and on the company’s size.

Outsourcing allows entrepreneurs and enterprises to save time, as they don’t have to spend time finding candidates for an in-house development team and going through all the legal procedures connected with hiring them.

However, the primary reason for companies to outsource development is, of course, to save money. And if you look at the average hourly rates around the world, you’ll understand why.

As you see, North America, the UK, and Australia are the most expensive software development destinations in the world. Our team, situated in Eastern Europe, can provide high quality for a much better price.

Now let’s see how many (8-hour) days it will take to develop the features we mentioned earlier.

Here are the average hours of development needed to implement these features. Note that we estimated these features independently, so the final estimate could be different. For example, if you needed to implement two kinds of trackers, it’s likely that the second would take less time as the underlying tool would be the same.

This information allows you to calculate how much your app might cost in different countries and at different rates.

However, keep in mind that these numbers are rough, and you’ll need a detailed estimate to understand your budget. Also, you need to consider time for testing, business analysis, design, and communication. For example, if a design is complex, it can take up to 20% of all development time.

Conclusion

There are so many questions parents have сoncerning conception, birth, and childcare, so the demand for apps that answer these questions is growing. Although there are already hundreds of childcare applications, there are only a few players on the market that have managed to win users’ love and loyalty.

If you want to create your own application for parents, this article might help you to understand the approximate cost of such a project.

There are three main things you need for a successful childcare app: real value for users, a quality app, and marketing. Without these components, there’s almost no chance your app will become successful. But if it does, there are lots of ways to monetize it. For instance, childcare applications can bring in money through childcare-related ads that are useful for parents.

Mobindustry can help you accomplish your goals. We provide business analysis, mobile development, and product marketing.