What Does It Cost to Build a Mobile App?

The honest answer is a range, and anyone quoting a single number before understanding the scope is guessing. But ranges are still useful, and the factors that move a project between them are knowable in advance.

What actually drives the number

Not screen count, which is the usual first question. The things that move budgets are:

Backend complexity. An app that reads from an API someone else maintains is a fraction of the work of one that needs its own data model, authentication, permissions, admin tooling and integrations.

Offline behaviour. An app that requires connectivity is substantially cheaper than one that works without it. Sync and conflict resolution are real engineering, not a setting.

Payments. In-app purchases and subscriptions bring receipt validation, restore flows, state reconciliation and store compliance. Budget meaningfully more than the UI suggests.

Platform integration. Widgets, background processing, deep camera or media work, health data, push with rich behaviour — each pulls work out of the cross-platform layer and into native code.

Design originality. An app built on platform-standard components costs less than one with a bespoke visual identity and custom motion.

Rough bands

These assume competent delivery, not the lowest bid available.

A focused single-purpose app — one core function, existing backend or simple storage, standard components, one platform. Weeks, not months.

A typical consumer app — accounts, a real backend, several core flows, subscriptions, both platforms. A few months of a small team.

A platform product — multiple user types, admin tooling, integrations, offline support, compliance requirements. Multiple quarters, and it does not end at launch.

Converting those to currency depends on who builds it, and rates vary by an order of magnitude globally. That variance is why "what does an app cost" has no portable answer.

The costs that get omitted from quotes

• App store accounts and their annual renewal.
• Backend hosting, which scales with usage, not with build cost.
• Third-party services — push, analytics, crash reporting, email, payment processing fees.
• Store assets: screenshots, preview videos, listing copy, localisation.
• Maintenance. Operating systems release annually and break things. An app with no maintenance budget degrades within a year.
• Support. Someone answers the reviews and the emails.

A useful planning rule: the first year after launch costs a meaningful fraction of the build again, between maintenance, iteration and infrastructure.

Why the cheapest quote is often the most expensive

A low fixed-price quote is usually priced against the narrowest possible reading of the scope. The gap between that reading and what you actually meant surfaces as change requests, and change requests priced after a contract is signed carry no competitive pressure.

A quote that asks hard questions first and gives a range is more likely to be accurate than one that gives a confident number immediately.

How to get a quote worth comparing

Write down the three things the app must do, who the users are, what systems it must connect to, and what "launched" means to you. That one page will produce more comparable quotes than a fifty-page specification written before anyone has thought about the hard parts.

Then ask every bidder the same two questions: what is the riskiest part of this, and what would you need to learn before committing to a number? The answers separate teams who have built this before from teams who have not.