How To Make an App Like Onlyfans

OnlyFans is a platform that caused a real upheaval in the online content market. The format of a social network based on subscriptions happened to be extremely convenient and brought the website huge popularity. The platform is favored not only by adult entertainment workers, but also by A-list celebrities and influencers. Despite the popularity of the service, its niche is quite free and cannot boast of fierce competition. Also, the quarantine has highly increased attendance of such sites, which will play into your hands too if you want to create an app like OnlyFans. In addition, there are stunning success cases. For example, Bella Thorne, a young American actress and former Disney star, earned two million dollars in less than a week after signing up (her monthly subscription costs 20 dollars).

How Does Onlyfans Work?

Our team was involved in the development of OnlyFans, so we know all the necessary features and mechanics, as well as some secret techniques to establish smooth user experience and app performance. If we start from the very beginning, OnlyFans was launched in 2016 as a platform where creators could sell their self-made content. The service is used by different sport and art influencers, but it is the most popular with those earning money on sharing explicit materials.

The functionality of this site looks simple: creators fill their page with content and choose a personal subscription fee, and ordinary users pay to follow them. Attention! Users have to be at least 18 years old and have an ID that proves it.

It is quite shocking how popular OnlyFans is. Think about the following: the platform has got 4.2M visitors per day on average. The idea of creating an alternative service seems even more attractive now, doesn’t it?

Cost of Developing an App Like Onlyfans

Considering our team’s experience in developing an OnlyFans app, we can easily answer the question “How much does it cost to make an app like OnlyFans?”. Here is how we estimate the working process:

The Process of Creating an Onlyfans Clone

Now let's dig into the details. What does each development part mean? Why does the process take so long? Which steps are unavoidable?

Business analysis

A competent business analyst can calculate and avoid risks, follow the progress of development and bring the project to a high level of payback soon after launching. The work of this specialist consists of the following stages:

1. Defining and elicitation (investigating business background and defining possible risks);
2. Solution design (making sure that the product and the solution chosen will meet both end-user’s and business requirements, working with the development team);
3. Documentation (including the description of the requirements for the solution and a choice of the order in which the functionality will be developed, together with the client);
4. Validation (consulting developers and designers, making sure that the design meets the requirements);
5. Communication (meetings with the team and the customer).

If you are looking to hire a business analyst, make sure they are experienced in similar projects.

Design

The design of the website will immediately affect the consumer’s impression and further desire to return, so do your best to make everything as trendy, simple and convenient as possible. The first step is to create the main style. Secondly, you should design an application with the following functionality (you will find out more about separate functions below):

• authorization;
• profile management;
• posts;
• users;
• real time chat;
• payments.

Finally, an admin panel should be designed:

• user management;
• post management;
• comment management;
• payments;
• settings.

Front-end development

You need to pay a lot of attention (and a lot of time) to front-end development if you want to make an app like OnlyFans. As mentioned before, the platform’s usage looks simple, but it is the achievement of a development team that has spent a lot of time and effort to combine design, performance and functionality. You need to think through absolutely every nuance while planning the functionality. We also defined the parts of this huge process:

• project setup (based on the latest version of Angular and its material, third-party libraries);
• basic markup (general style, header/footer);
• authorization (registration/login using email/social networks, logout, password recovery);
• profile management (adding/changing personal information – input fields and pictures, the ability to change email and password);
• post creation/updating (they can contain different types of information, such as videos, photos, texts and polls, the duration of which can be chosen);
• actions with posts (an ability to like, comment, buy a paid post, delete a comment);
• post lists (my post list, liked post list with searching, filtering and pagination);
• users (user list, the ability to follow/unfollow a user, profile view – photos, post list, an ability to tip);
• favorite users (favorite list, an ability to add/delete a user from the list);
• messages (followers/following users only, the ability to use a third-party service);
• real time chat (users can exchange text messages, pictures and emoji. A piece of advice from our team: use the Twilio platform);
• payments (three cases – subscription purchase, tipping a user, buying a paid post; multiple methods, current balance view, transaction history);
• subscriptions (three types of subscription, a user can choose which type their post requires).

While building the admin panel, you should use the same code base (then you will be able to reuse components). This process includes:

• user management (user CRUD, user list, an ability to block users with no indication of the duration or the reason required);
• post management (post CRUD and list);
• comment management (comment list, an ability to delete a comment);
• complaint management (a list with Zendesk integration);
• payments (a list of the whole transaction history and manual payments to content makers).

Given such an amount of work, it is not surprising that OnlyFans app pricing is relatively high, but we can see on the great example that it is worth it.

Back-end development

he back-end development requires meticulous attention to details and excellent developers’ skills. We recommend this basic functionality list:

• environment setup;
• project initiation, architecture and database design;
• deploy preparation;
• authorization, following/unfollowing/blocking users;
• favorite users;
• profile management;
• posts;
• messages (real time chat, chat rooms);
• subscriptions;
• push-notifications;
• payments, payment system integration, wallets and fee.

Project management

Before your project starts, you should spend about 12 hours refining the requirements and analyzing the support that could be needed. Then you should organize the process in the following phases:

1. Project start. You have enough details to prepare the initial backlog and project schedule.
2. Communication:

• Regular meetings of three types;
• Sprint planning, where all the questions that need to be answered to start working will be discussed;
• Daily meetings. Everyday discussion of short questions;
• Weekly meetings. A plan for the next week and bigger questions will be discussed;
• Adhoc communication (Slack conversations).

3. Project management. Backlog maintenance and elaboration, requirements clarification

QA testing

It is obvious that a large-scale project such as creating an app like OnlyFans requires running a huge number of tests at all stages of its implementation. Our experts have defined the necessary steps of the testing process:

1. Test documentation and strategies.
2. Testing process:

• Smoke testing (a minimal test run for each part of the architecture);
• Sanity testing (checking new functionality and looking for bugs);
• Regression testing (making sure that the new functionality hasn’t affected the initial functionality);
• UI testing (checking design elements and their look in different resolutions);
• Integration testing (checking whether all units of code interact with each other in a right way);
• Security testing (verifying the security system);
• Usability testing (checking whether your service is convenient for users and works without errors).

3. Project management. Backlog maintenance and elaboration, requirements clarification

Application deployment

The deployment process is better trusted to professionals. It’s full of nuances and details, but the short version is:

1. Creating VPC, private and public subnets, Security groups and a jump host in Public Subnet;
2. Starting Rabbit MQ server, Backend WEB instance, Frontend WEB instance;
3. Setting up DNS records;
4. Starting RDS DB cluster, AWS application load balancer;
5. Launching templates and AutoScaling groups for FE and BE;
6. Setting up CloudWatch agent;
7. Requesting ACM cert;
8. Registering SES.

Our team has experience in deploying apps of any complexity, so we are ready to tell you the full order of actions during this phase and demonstrate its successful application.

Conclusion

You are on this page and have already read through the whole article, which is the first step to creating your own OnlyFans clone. The estimate of time and investments may look overwhelming, but do not forget about the relatively quick payback of such a project. If you are interested in personal detailed consulting, contact us. We’d be glad to share our experience and help you choose the right roadmap for your project.