How much does an NFT website cost to develop?

Designing your digital asset

You can mint almost anything to become an NFT. Some NFTs will cost more in time to create than finances; it depends on what you want your NFT collection to be. For example, if you are a photographer, you may want to sell a collection of your photos as NFTs.

The cost associated with creating your NFT will be closely related to how much time you spent taking the photos and the costs associated with taking the pictures. Gaining high popularity nowadays is the Bored Apes NFT collection. Made up of 1,000’s different variations, a whole design team will be behind the design of these NFTs and the cost to create will be huge compared to a photographer’s collection.

These are only two examples of static, 2D NFT collections. However, you can get 3D NFTs, animations, short video clips or music.

Examples of NFTs:

NFT Metadata

When you buy a traditional painting, you get the artwork, and that’s it. You don’t know anything about the artist, their process to create the work, or what inspired them. But with non-fungible tokens, all of that information is encoded into the piece itself.

NFT metadata lists data associated with a non-fungible token, or NFT. This data can include the name of the NFT, its owner, when it was created and how it can be used. NFTs are stored on a blockchain, and the metadata is used to track and manage the ownership of these tokens. The importance of NFT metadata lies in its ability to help prevent fraud and ensure that NFTs are appropriately tracked and accounted for.

By maintaining an accurate and up-to-date record of NFT ownership, businesses and individuals can rest assured that their assets are safe and sound. In an increasingly digital world, the ability to keep track of virtual assets will only become more important.

Utility and Smart Contracts

A smart contract is attached to any NFT that is sold, and this outlines the terms of ownership, utility and any ongoing royalties tied to the NFT. Using our previous example, a photographer may sell an NFT from their collection as digital art.

Alternatively, Nike may sell an NFT directly connected to a pair of trainers that proves ownership. You could either trade the NFT (including the pair of trainers), or you can burn the NFT and receive the product. This concept could be used for any physical product today, where people collect an item with the hope that its value will increase over time.

NFTs could be attached to tickets for music or sporting events to give you additional perks, attached to a piece of music that you wish to sell the royalties for, or as part of gameplay to purchase avatars or digital assets in the form of in-game perks.

Depending on the complexity of smart contracts, this will directly impact the development cost when using blockchain technology. Typical features of a smart contract when selling an NFT collection includes a ‘whitelist’ stage or a ‘reveal’ stage of the project.

Reveal: An NFT project can be launched and available to purchase before the customer can view the NFT. The ‘reveal’ date can be set within the smart contract, revealing the NFTs to the public either by date or when a certain amount of the NFTs has been purchased.

Whitelist: You can place the wallet address of selected buyers on a whitelist, meaning they get the first opportunity to purchase an NFT collection before the NFT becomes available for the mass public.

As well as considering the functionality of your smart contract, a decision will need to be made on whether you should launch your NFT collection using the Ethereum blockchain or use an alternative. While other blockchains may have lower gas fees, they have few users and will likely encounter the same growing pains if they ever reach the size of Ethereum.

Alternative options:

As with any other typical website, you will need to design your Minting page or NFT marketplace before developing it. There are two types of NFT websites:

Brochure Website with Minting Feature

A Minting page is a simple website that allows the end-user to visit a website and mint an NFT directly from the page. These websites will likely consist of a home, about, contact and the minting page. A core element of any NFT platform is to outline the project’s roadmap and promote the community and future of your NFT unique digital asset.

NFT Marketplace Design

The difference between a standard website with a minting page and an NFT marketplace is the number of pages that will need to be designed. An NFT marketplace allows the end-user to purchase and trade non-fungible tokens directly through the adaptive online platform.

NFT Marketplace Features:

The development of an NFT marketplace platform can become a complex project. While a typical website can be secured relatively easily, NFT marketplaces handle transactions and smart contracts that must be safe against vulnerabilities.

The infrastructure must be set up to host the staging environment of the NFT marketplace when initially developing and then prepared for when the website goes live. The recommended hosting platform to use for NFT marketplace development would be AWS.

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides customers with a wide range of services, including storage, computing power, content delivery, and more. AWS is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, and cost-effective platform that helps businesses of all sizes take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

AWS offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model that allows you to only pay for the services you use, making it an affordable option for businesses of all sizes. In addition, AWS provides a number of features and tools that make it easy to get started with cloud computing, including a simple interface and management console.

Security & Ongoing Costs

As with any other website that involves purchasing and trading, websites are no different and should be protected against malicious acts. To do this, relevant security software should be installed on the hosting platform and regular checks and vulnerability reviews carried out.

While no platform is ever 100% safe against an attack, it is important to do your utmost to secure your NFT marketplace.

As you can see, there are multiple factors when building an NFT marketplace platform. Using Blockchain technology is still relatively new, and it is an important phase of the project to detail precisely how you want your NFT to work and its utility. The key points to determine the NFT marketplace development cost are as follows:

Brochure website with Minting page

NFT Marketplace