How We Built a Mobile App That Actually Works (And Costs €225/Month Instead of €50,000)

Before we started Newsifier, we were news publisher ourselves.

We hired a fancy agency to build us a mobile app. It cost €50,000 and took months of weekly calls, spec reviews, and "we're almost there" updates. When it finally launched, everyone on the team sighed in relief.

Until the website started going offline.

And not just once — it kept happening. Every time traffic picked up, boom: site offline. We'd scramble to figure out what was wrong, and then the finger-pointing would start.

The app developers said: "It's your hosting."

The hosting provider said: "The mobile app is overloading the server with API calls."

The web developer said: "The app isn't syncing correctly. Not our issue."

We were stuck in the middle with a broken site, a broken mobile app, and no answers. We'd spent €50,000 on an app that was actively making our site go offline. And then we were told we'd need to spend another €20,000 just to "make it stable."

So when we started Newsifier in 2019 we knew we wanted to do things differently.Today, Newsfier powers 400 news websites and 25 mobile across 9 countries, and they consistently rate us five in the app stores.

The One-Team Solution

What do we do different?There is one system and team for your CMS, hosting, mobile app, and support. Everything is fully synced and integrated. Everything is designed to work together from day one.

No blame game. No middleware breaking under load. No surprise invoices when something needs "stabilizing."

Why Publishers Are Launching Mobile Apps Now

Traffic from Facebook and Google has become unreliable. Google Discover shows your articles one day and not the next. Facebook reach keeps declining. Search algorithms change without warning.

A mobile app gives you four major advantages:

Direct Access to Your Audience

Push notifications let you reach readers instantly and build up a direct connection with your readers — no algorithm decides whether they see your content. Breaking news reaches 15,000 readers in minutes, not hours.

App Store Visibility

Millions of people search the Apple App Store and Google Play Store every day. Your app appears in searches for "local news," "sports news," or your city name — bringing you extra readers who never visit your website. This is traffic you're missing right now.

Competitive Advantage

Some readers simply prefer apps over websites. If your competitor has an app and you don't, you're losing those readers. They'll download the competitor's app and see their push notifications, not yours.

Brand Loyalty

Your app becomes part of readers' daily routine. It sits on their home screen. They open it multiple times a day. This builds the kind of loyal, returning audience that platform traffic can never deliver.

That's why more Newsifier clients are launching apps every month — and seeing higher engagement from app users compared to web visitors.

How It Actually Works: Real Integration, Not Just an API

Most mobile apps are built separately from your website. They connect through APIs, and that's where things break. Your site updates, the API doesn't know about it. Traffic spikes, the API can't handle it. You want to change something, you need to coordinate with three different vendors.

Our mobile app is one-on-one linked to our CMS. Not through some fragile API layer, but actually integrated.

What does that mean in practice?

You change your navigation menu in the Newsifier CMS. It updates in the app instantly. No app update needed. No coordination calls.

You publish an article with a live blog, polls, or related articles? It all shows up in the app exactly the same way it appears on your website.The whole article markup is identical. 

Your readers leave comments in the app? They sync one-on-one with your website. Replies, likes, everything. Someone commenting on the web can have a conversation with someone commenting in the app. It's one community, not two separate ones.

This isn't just convenience. This is what makes the app actually useful to your readers and actually manageable for your team.

Your Brand, Your Design

What about design and branding?

The app is fully customized to match your publication. You provide your logo, choose your colors, and select from design options that fit your style. It looks and feels like a natural extension of your website, not a generic template with your name on it.

The customization happens during setup, but you maintain control through the CMS. Want to adjust the menu structure or featured content? You can do that yourself without needing us to push an app update.

Features That Keep Readers Coming Back

Our mobile app solution has been continuously improved for over 5 years and comes with every feature your readers want

Night Mode: Because people read before bed, and nobody wants to be blinded by a white screen at 11 PM.

Bookmarks: Save articles to read later. Simple, but readers love it.

Topic Notifications: Let readers subscribe to only the topics they care about. Breaking news on politics? Sure. Celebrity gossip? Maybe not. They choose.

Full Feature Parity: Everything that works on your website works in the app. Live blogs update in real-time. Polls are interactive. Related articles show up. Embedded content displays correctly. This sounds basic, but most apps don't do it.

Comments and Community: Readers can participate in the conversation right from the app. Because everything is built into the same system, the comments sync instantly between app and website — one unified community.

You can even customize all of this from your CMS. Want to change what appears in the app menu? Do it yourself, no developer needed. It updates immediately.

Advertisements in the mobile app

We integrate with all the major ad providers. Google Ad Manager, Outbrain, Strossle, so you can monetize without compromising the experience.

You can check our mobile app advertising solutions here.

So what is the cost for the mobile app?

Here's the breakdown:

• Setup: €399
• Monthly: €225

For that, you get:

• A fully functional iOS and Android app
• Setup completed in about a week (not five months)
• Continuous updates for every new iOS and Android version
• Updates for new phone models as they come out
• Full integration with the Newsifier CMS
• Support from the same team that handles everything else

Compare that to the industry standard: €50,000+ to build, 5+ months of coordination hell, and then surprise bills every time Apple releases iOS 18 or you need a new feature.

Our apps consistently get high ratings in the app stores because they actually work the way readers expect them to. And when something doesn't work? You're talking to one team who can actually fix it.

Ready to Launch Your Mobile App?

Our mobile app is part of the complete Newsifier solution—which is why it integrates so seamlessly with your CMS and hosting. If you're tired of coordinating multiple vendors and want everything working together, let's talk.

We'd be happy to show you how the app works and answer any questions.