What an App Costs, Priced by What It Has to Do
No bronze, silver and gold. An app is priced by its shape — how many stores it ships to, and whether it has to survive without a signal, talk to hardware or move data in real time. Every figure here is indicative and in US dollars.
Three Shapes, Not Three Tiers
Almost every first build lands in one of these three. Find the one that sounds like your app, then read the section below on what moves it up or down.
Simple, one platform
$12,000–$25,000 indicative
A focused app on iOS or Android, typically 8 to 12 weeks.
- One store, one kind of user
- Roughly 8 to 15 screens around one core job
- Content, forms, lists, push notifications
- A straightforward backend, or your existing API
- Design, device QA, submission and listing included
Standard, both stores
$25,000–$55,000 indicative
iOS and Android with accounts and payments, typically 14 to 22 weeks.
- Both stores, usually one shared codebase
- Sign-up, profiles and two or three user roles
- Payments, or subscriptions through store billing
- Custom backend, admin view and analytics wired up
- Everything in the simple band
Complex or hardware-facing
$55,000–$120,000+ indicative
Real-time, offline-first or connected to physical devices. From 22 weeks.
- Live tracking, messaging or collaborative data
- Full offline use with conflict resolution on sync
- Bluetooth devices, scanners, background location
- Native builds where the hardware demands them
- Often phased, starting with a paid discovery
Indicative bands, not a price list. They exist so you can tell whether your idea is a $20,000 conversation or an $80,000 one. Nothing on this page is a quote, and none of it is confirmed until after a scoping call.
Put Your Own App Through the Numbers
The estimator asks for your platform choice, a rough screen count and the features you already know you need, then shows a range and a delivery window. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask for the breakdown by email.
Support Plans, Priced by How Much Attention the App Needs
An app left alone does not stay where you left it. Operating systems update, certificates expire, store policies change and libraries go unmaintained. These are monthly retainers, and any of them can start on an app we did not build.
Keep It Alive
$500–$1,000 per month, indicative
The minimum that stops an app quietly rotting.
- OS release compatibility checks and fixes
- Certificate and signing key renewals before they expire
- Store policy changes and re-declarations
- Crash monitoring with a monthly summary
Maintain and Improve
$1,200–$3,000 per month, indicative
Upkeep plus a standing budget for small changes.
- Everything in Keep It Alive
- An agreed block of hours each month for changes
- Defect fixes with an agreed response time
- Periodic releases rather than only emergency ones
Continuous Roadmap
$3,500–$8,000 per month, indicative
A working team on your app month after month.
- Everything in Maintain and Improve
- Regular feature releases on a shared roadmap
- Analytics review and store listing iteration
- Scale up or down at the start of any month
Where a plan lands inside its band depends on how many platforms are live, how much the app touches hardware, and how quickly you need a defect answered.
A Fixed-Price App Audit
If you already have an app, or half of one, this is a small finite piece of work that tells you what you are holding before anybody asks you for a build budget.
Mobile App Audit
$1,500–$3,000 one-off, indicative
Usually one to two weeks, delivered as a written report.
- We build it from source and run it on real handsets
- Architecture, dependency health and unmaintained libraries
- Signing keys, store accounts and who actually controls them
- Security, privacy declarations and permission use
- Continue or rebuild, with a costed plan for each
Why start here
Most people who arrive with an existing app have been told two incompatible stories by two different developers. An audit replaces both with something you can act on, and it costs a fraction of the build it might lead to.
It is also the cheapest possible way to find out how we think before you commit to anything larger. You see the writing, the reasoning and how blunt we are willing to be. If the conclusion is that your current developer should finish the job, that is what the report will say.
The report is yours whatever happens next. Take it to another studio, take it to your board, use it to negotiate with whoever built the app in the first place.
- Fixed price agreed before we start, never hourly
- No obligation to build anything with us afterwards
- Signed under an NDA if you would prefer one
What Moves the Number
Screen count is what everyone asks about. On a mobile project it is rarely the thing that decides the budget.
Pushes it up
- Two separate native builds rather than one shared codebase, which is close to two apps to write and test.
- Working offline properly — a local database, a sync queue and rules for what wins when two people edited the same record.
- Anything continuous in the background: location tracking on a shift, uploads, geofences, all of which fight the battery and the platform limits.
- Hardware in the loop: Bluetooth peripherals, barcode scanners, card readers, printers, each with its own firmware quirks.
- Real-time data that several devices must agree on within a second or two.
- Selling digital content, which brings store billing rules, restore flows, receipt validation and their own review scrutiny.
- Supporting very old OS versions or very small screens, which widens the test matrix rather than the feature list.
- A companion watch or TV app, which is a second interface with its own design language.
- Custom animation and bespoke visual language beyond a clean, platform-standard interface.
Brings it down
- One store first. Launch where your users actually are and add the second once you know people use the app.
- A cross-platform codebase when the app is mostly screens, forms and API calls, which most apps are.
- Cutting version one to the single job a user opens the app to do, and deferring the rest deliberately rather than accidentally.
- Read-only offline — cache and show the last data instead of allowing edits that later have to be merged.
- Using proven services for sign-in, payments, push and maps rather than building your own.
- Accepting the platform-standard interface components instead of a bespoke design system for the first release.
- Having brand assets, copy and business rules ready at kickoff rather than mid-sprint.
- One decision-maker who can approve inside two business days.
Included, and Never Included
Third-party costs are real, modest next to a build, and genuinely yours. We would rather you read them here than meet them in an invoice.
Not line items
- UX design, screen design and the clickable prototype
- QA on real handsets across a range of ages and screen sizes
- App icon, screenshots and a first store listing pass
- Signing setup, submission and review correspondence
- Crash reporting and basic analytics wired up before launch
- Project management, daily updates and the handover documentation
After the defect window
- Compatibility work for each new OS release
- Certificate renewals and dependency upgrades
- Crash triage and fixes on live releases
- Small features from an agreed monthly block of hours
Real work, priced on its own
- Adding a second platform after the first has launched
- Ongoing app store optimisation past the first listing pass
- Migrating users and data out of an existing app
- A companion watch or TV app alongside the phone build
- Running your cloud infrastructure on your behalf
Yours, paid directly
- The Apple developer account, which carries a yearly fee
- The Google Play developer account, which carries a one-off registration fee
- Paid third-party APIs: maps, messaging, identity checks, payment processing
- Cloud hosting and running costs once the app is live
- Stock imagery, paid fonts, video and photography
- Advertising spend and any paid user acquisition
We set every one of these up in your own accounts so you pay the list price directly, rather than a marked-up version routed through us. Store and platform fees change from time to time, so we point you at the current figure instead of printing one here that will go stale.
Four Milestones, Agreed Before You Sign
A typical fixed-price build. The exact split is written into the contract, and nothing is invoiced that was not on that list.
On signing
Roughly 30 per cent. Covers kickoff, account setup and the design stage starting.
Prototype sign-off
Roughly 20 per cent, when you have approved the screens and the prototype on your own phone.
Feature complete
Roughly 30 per cent, when the agreed scope is built and in device QA.
Store approval
The balance when the app is live, not when we hand over a build. The submission is part of the job.
Estimates become quotes only after scoping
Everything on this page is an indicative range. A quote is a different document: it names the screen inventory, the platforms, the OS versions supported, the integrations, the acceptance criteria and an explicit list of what is excluded. It follows a scoping call, and on larger projects it follows the design stage, because that is the first point at which anybody can price the work honestly.
If a studio sends you a firm fixed price for a mobile app before that conversation has happened, one of two things is true: the number is padded to cover what they do not know, or it will be revised upwards once the work starts. We would rather give you a range now and a real number when we have earned the right to one.
Support plans and audits are quoted the same way. Everything is invoiced in US dollars.
Questions About Cost
Why is there no fixed price list?
Because two apps that sound identical on a call can differ by a factor of three once you know what sits behind the screens. A booking app where a slot is either free or taken is a straightforward build. The same booking app with staff rosters, deposits, cancellation rules and a live availability feed is a different project wearing the same name. The bands on this page exist so you can tell within a minute which conversation you are having, and the number becomes real after a scoping call.
Why does adding the second platform not double the price?
Because a large share of the work is not platform-specific. The design, the backend, the business rules, the store and QA groundwork are done once regardless. With a cross-platform build the interface code is shared too, so a second store commonly adds a modest percentage rather than another whole app. Two separate native builds cost considerably more than one, though still less than two projects, and we will tell you on the first call which of the two your app genuinely needs.
What does the fixed-price app audit include?
We build your existing app from source, run it on real handsets, and read the code, the dependencies and the release setup. You get a written report: what the architecture is, what state the codebase is in, which dependencies are unmaintained, what the store accounts and signing keys look like, the security and privacy issues we found, and a straight recommendation on whether to continue the codebase or replace it. Both routes come with an indicative cost. The report is yours to keep and take to any studio you like.
When does an estimate become an actual quote?
After scoping, never before. The estimator on this site and the bands on this page are indicative ranges meant to tell you the order of magnitude. A quote is a written document naming a screen inventory, the platforms, the integrations, the supported OS versions and what is excluded, and it follows a scoping call and usually the design stage. Anybody who sends you a firm number for a mobile app before that conversation is either padding it heavily or intends to ask for more money later.
What if our budget is smaller than the bottom band?
Say so on the first call and we will be straight with you. Sometimes the honest answer is to cut version one to a single workflow on a single platform, which can land under the bottom band. Sometimes it is that the app you have described cannot be built well for the money, in which case we would rather say that than take a deposit and deliver something you will be embarrassed to launch. And occasionally the answer is that you do not need an app yet at all.
Get a Real Number for Your App
Send us the detail and we will come back within two business days with a scope, a timeline and a cost range you can take to a board.