The cost of building a mobile app can vary pretty widely depending on the scope of the product and the level of quality you need:
On the low end, you can find offshore dev shops who can build MVPs for $25-50k. A serious, professionally built product, with a well-scoped MVP will typically run somewhere in the $300-600K range. And you can get up to the $1-3M+ range for complex enterprise builds and large-scale projects
The reason the range is so big is that mobile app builds can massively vary depending on a few different factors. Namely:
- Scope: How much you build
- Complexity: How technically complex it is under the hood
- Platforms: How many platforms you want to build for (e.g. iOS, Android)
- Design Quality: How polished do you want the design to be?
- Along with a few more factors
It's impossible to tell you exactly how much a mobile app will cost to build without scoping out all the details. But in this guide, I'm going to break down the key factors that drive price.
And we'll help give you a framework to estimate how much it would cost to build the mobile app you have in mind.
(We've built mobile apps for some amazing brands over the last 10+ years. If you're looking for help from an experienced digital product studio, we'd love to hear more about your project.)
How Much Does it Cost to Build an App?
Before we get into the key factors that drive the price of a mobile app, I want to give you a high level estimate of what various types of project scopes can look like.
Here are the ballpark rates for each:
As you start doing research into pricing, you'll see averages thrown around a lot.
For example, there's a $171,450 figure that gets cited a ton.
But I'd suggest you don't take those numbers too literally. Averages like this blend in a lot of freelancer, offshore, and simple-app work - so they tend to run low for what it actually costs to build a polished, professionally engineered product with a senior team.
The real number for your specific project will most likely not be $171K.
Yours could land under it, or (more likely, if you want a quality build) well over.
I'd also advise you to treat every number in this guide the same way... take them as ballpark ranges to help you estimate and plan, not as quotes.
Where your specific project will land depends on a specific set of factors, which are helpful to know when planning your budget. App development isn’t usually priced in a way where a set budget gets you a guaranteed list of features. What you’re actually buying is a team’s time to build out the scope and deliver features your users actually want.
The 6 Biggest Factors that Drive the Cost of Building a Mobile App
The cost to build an app is largely determined by the following factors. And you can dial the price up and down to fit your budget & goals by adjusting each of these levers:
1. Scope and Feature Set
Scope is a just fancy way of saying "How much do you want to build?"
This is by far the biggest cost driver for one simple reason: the more you want the app to do, the more work there is - and the more you pay.
In other words, if you build twice as much, you can expect to roughly double the cost.
Let me give you an example where we illustrate 2 different levels of scope for the same app idea.
Imagine you're building a fitness app:
- MVP scope: a user can log a workout and see their history. You only build one core feature set. And it will require 5-6 two-week sprints worth of work.
- Full scope: all of that, plus a social feed of your friend's activity, fitness challenges, wearable syncing, an AI coach, and a video library.
Even though the app idea is the same ("I want to build a fitness app"), the fully scoped version will likely cost 4-5x as much as the MVP version.
But there's a trap that a lot of people fall into here, which we call "Scope Creep."
They make the assumption that you have to build ALL the features up-front before anyone will use the app. Building is fun and addictive, so teams keep adding more and more features. And the price starts to skyrocket.
But in our experience, this isn't the best path to build a successful mobile app.
At Studio, we recommend starting with a small, tightly scoped MVP ("minimum viable product"). Getting to market as quickly as possible. And then putting the product in real user's hands, and iterating based on their feedback.
When scoping out a project, the question you want to ask yourself is: "What is the absolute minimum set of features that delivers the core of the value to our users, and proves people want what we're building."
This is where we recommend starting, regardless of your long-term vision for the app.
2. Technical Complexity
This is about how hard a feature is to build under the hood, regardless of how simple it looks on screen.
Two features can look identical to a user and cost wildly different amounts.
Let's take a chat feature, for example:
- The simpler version: you send a message, and the other person sees it when they refresh the screen. This is fairly simple to implement.
- The more involved version: messages show up in real-time, with typing indicators, read receipts, and a presence indicator that shows who is online. This requires infrastructure to support live, real-time interactions - which is a meaningfully larger chunk of engineering work.
And this applies to anything you're looking to build.
The cost increases as the feature gets more complex under the hood, because it takes more time for the team to do the engineering work to build it properly.
Our suggestion is to start with the simplest version of a feature to get started. And then you can choose to make it more advanced over time once you validate that your users really care about it.
3. Platforms: iOS, Android, or Both
You can build for iPhone, for Android, or for both.
And this choice can make a really big difference in the price. Almost more than any other technical decision.
"Native" means developing a separate app written for each platform in its own language: Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. These apps perform the best, and "feel" the best to the user - and it also costs more. Two separate native apps means developing two separate codebases, and can run roughly 1.7 - 2x times the cost of one native app.
"Cross-platform" means that you develop one app (and one codebase) that is able to run on both platforms by using a tool like React Native or Flutter. It usually saves 30-50% against the cost of building two native apps.
But the downsides of this approach are often overlooked.
First, you lose a little polish, and the app may have a bit of friction with the newest device features (where they don't run quite as smoothly as they would natively).
Secondly, you're making every product mistake and assumption on two platforms at once. Instead of learning on one platform, evolving the product, and then expanding, you've doubled the surface area of the first experiment.
Which option is best for your app? Here's how we suggest making the choice:
- If your users are overwhelmingly on one platform, build that one first. A consumer app aimed at young users in the US is best suited for iPhone. An app for field workers on using company phones most likely leans toward Android.
- If the app's core features require on-device hardware like the camera, AR, or Bluetooth, native is probably worth the additional cost.
- For most content, commerce, and dashboard-style apps, cross-platform is fine. It's the more affordable option and your users won't feel the difference.
To be honest, you almost never need to build for both platforms on day one. Picking one platform and building it natively is one of the easiest ways to keep your first build affordable, and it usually beats cross-platform as a way to save money, because you learn on one platform before you scale to two.
4. Design Quality
Design quality is a spectrum. And the more premium the design, the higher the price.
At the low end of the price range you get functional design, screens that work and look "fine." At the high end is consumer-grade design, which is the the level of polish you might expect from Apple, or some other big consumer tech company.
The level of design quality you need depends on the product.
An internal tool used by your own team doesn't need highly polished design. But a consumer app fighting for attention against some of the most popular apps in the world? High quality design is table stakes (and consumer-grade is worth paying for).
5. Backend and Integrations
The backend is the server-side engine that the user-facing part of your app talks to:
- The database
- The business logic
- And the connections to other systems
If your app mostly just stores and fetches basic data (such as user accounts and a list of items), the backend can be pretty light and affordable.
However, backend costs can climb for two reasons: scale and integrations.
Scale is about how many users your app can handle, and how fast it's able to respond. A backend that can support a thousand users is straightforward. But if it needs to be fast, never go down, and be able to handle millions of users - this requires a completely different architecture for your app that will drive the price up quite a bit.
And integrations are where surprises can happen. Every outside system you connect to is its own mini-project. The deeper the integration, the more it costs. For example, if all you need to do is call a modern payment API - that's quick and simple to implement. But if you need to wire into a company's existing legacy system and build out the integration yourself - that's a much larger project.
6. Who Builds It (+ Where They're Located)
Another big pricing variable is the type of team you hire:
- Freelancers are one of the more affordable options on a "per hour" basis. And they're fine for small, well-defined chunks of work - as long as you're ready to manage them yourself.
- Offshore dev shops can be even more affordable. However, it's pretty common to end up paying a lot of that back in time spent managing the team, timezone gaps and communication lag, as well as the challenge of translating your vision into specs they can build. The deeper issue is that they’ll often just build exactly what you ask them to with zero product input, so if the original spec is even slightly off, your product won’t deliver what your audience wants. They also tend to bill feature-by-feature, which sounds reassuring, but creates the incentive to build more than you need - rather than getting to market quickly, getting real feedback from users, and iterating.
- Product studios tend to cost more on an hourly basis. But you get a fundamentally different service from a typical dev shop. A product studio gives you a senior design and engineering team that already works well together, and has shipped real products at scale. You're not gambling on whether a brand-new team will gel well, or whether they have the right skills - and you don't have to keep anyone on payroll.
- Building your own in-house team is the biggest (and riskiest) commitment of all. You take on the salaries and benefits of the team. And you also have to do the slow, expensive work of recruiting talent and managing the team day to day. Hiring is hard... a single wrong hire can set you back six to twelve months, and you carry that cost whether or not you have enough work for the team at any given time.
There's a simpler way to think about all this.
If you've raised a round or you're putting real money into a new product, a big chunk of it goes to product and engineering. And the goal is to de-risk that capital - not just to spend the least. So if you're optimizing purely for the lowest hourly rate, a product studio probably isn't the right fit. But if you're deploying serious capital and want to reliably ship a high-quality, polished product, then a product studio could be a great option (we'd love to chat).
Outside of just the cost, we suggest looking for a team that's more than just developers. Most mobile builds need a designer and a product manager alongside the engineers - which is why the blended team rate you get with a product studio is a completely different thing from a single contractor's hourly rate.
And lastly, the hardest thing to find - and the #1 predictor of whether your app works - is product thinking. Some teams just build the spec you hand them... this is incredibly common with freelancers and offshore dev shops. But the best ones help you figure out what to build, understand what users want, and iterate based on their feedback. That's a rare skill (it's why so many apps fail). And it's the difference between a vendor and a partner.
Where Does the Money Go During a Build?
Budget typically gets allocated across five phases.
Development is the largest and most expensive part. But it's not the only thing that goes into building a mobile app:
- Discovery and strategy: Expect this to be ~10-15% of budget - This is where you nail down exactly what problem you're solving, who the users are, and what the feature set should be.
- Design: ~15% of budget - This is where you design the core screens and flows of the app.
- Development: ~50% - This is where the software developers write the code for the app.
- QA and testing: ~10% - This is an important part of the process where you test all the core features to make sure they work the way they're supposed to.
- Launch and deployment: ~5-10% - this step is where you push the app live and get it into the app stores.
At Studio, we spend the first 3-4 weeks on product strategy and designing the core user journey (the main flows that deliver the core value of the app to your users). Development starts around week 4 and runs in two-week sprints - with design staying one sprint ahead of the engineers.
We recommend keeping the scope of your MVP to a maximum of 5-6 sprints. Anything beyond that and you're over-building for a first version. We always suggest that our client cuts scope down to max 5-6 sprints, get the MVP into the market, and then continue to iterate and add new features once you have real users in the product.
Not only does this cap your up-front cost. But counter-intuitively, it increases your chances of success. Building alone in the dark without getting user feedback is one of the biggest failure modes we see in mobile apps.
The build itself isn’t the only spend you need to consider. You’ll also want to factor in the budget for growth and execute your go-to-market strategy to get people into the app. If your entire budget goes on the app with nothing left for growth, you may end up stuck with a great app, but no way to get people to beta test it and give you feedback.
What Happens (and What It Costs) After Launch?
One mistake we see a lot is treating the first version as the final version. But launch is just the starting line.
If you launch an app and never touch it again... it's probably not going to work out long-term.
If you look at the most successful apps, they continue to be improved on an ongoing basis after launch. And that ongoing work needs a team behind it.
Here's what that work involves:
- New features. The roadmap doesn't stop at launch. Especially if you're shipping an MVP, you should be continuing to add new features based on what will help you drive new users and keep them around long term.
- Bug fixes and security patches. As real users interact with your app, they're going to find all sorts of bugs you missed in your initial testing. And security holes can even appear in the open-source libraries your app is built on. You need to be triaging and fixing these issues quickly and regularly.
- OS updates. Apple and Google both ship major OS versions every year. And these updates will regularly break things in your app. Retired APIs, new permission prompts, a screen size that throws off your layout, and so on. Someone has to test your app against each new OS update and fix what broke. Otherwise your app will slowly degrade.
- Hosting and infrastructure. Servers, database, and storage cost money every month. And the bills grow as your usage grows. This might start as a few hundred dollars a month when you launch, but can become costly once you have meaningful traffic and user data.
- Third-party service fees. Most apps use vendors for capabilities like maps, messaging, payment processing, and so on. And those vendors bill every month based on how much you use (sometimes changing their prices or APIs on you).
The ongoing roadmap after launch is where the most important work usually happens - so the team doesn't disband at launch, it keeps going. At Studio, we run that roadmap with clients on a two-week loop.
We observe how real users interact with the product, see where people drop off or get stuck, and figure out what to build next based on data rather than guesswork.
How to Estimate Your App's Cost
Every project is different. But here's how we suggest you go about estimating cost:
Don't try to add up a price for each feature. Instead, the way to think about it: what size team would be needed to build this product, and how long would you need them for?
That's how successful mobile apps actually get staffed, and it's a much more realistic way to plan.
1. Start with your core user journey
Write down the one thing a user MUST be able to do for your app to be useful to them - the main thing your app does.
Cut out everything else that is "extra" beyond the bare bones functionality needed for your app to deliver it's primary value to the user.
This feature set is your MVP scope.
It should feel so simple - so barebones - that it even feels a little bit uncomfortable. This is normal.
Everything outside of the core feature set can wait until after you ship the first version.
2. Translate that scope into a team and a timeline
Building your app will require a team - typically a product manager, a designer, and a few engineers. And they'll be working in two-week sprints.
So the cost comes down to two things:
- How big of a team is required
- How many sprints it takes to ship your MVP scope
A lean MVP (e.g. one core flow, a basic backend, a single platform) typically needs a product team for about 5-6 sprints (roughly 14-16 weeks). You can expect that to land in the $250-400K range.
And the price increases with scope from there.
As scope increases, more sprints (or sometimes larger teams) are required which will increase the cost.
3. Decide how many platforms you need
If you build two native apps (one for iOS, one for Android) you can expect to roughly double the front-end engineering work versus a single platform.
Going cross-platform gets you both platforms for noticeably less, but it comes at the cost of a little polish.
The simplest way to keep a first build lean is to pick the one platform your users are primarily on and start there.
4. Add for complexity and regulation
Technically demanding features add engineering time (e.g. real-time infrastructure, offline support, heavy integrations, AI features, etc).
And if you're in a regulated space like healthcare or fintech, compliance work adds more on top (we'll explain more in the next section).
This will all push you towards the higher end of the range.
5. Plan for life after launch
The number you just built is your initial build cost. But we recommend you also budget for the ongoing development roadmap. That way the team can continue shipping and improve the product after launch.
6. Add it all up
Now check your total against the four tiers at the beginning of this post. If the number is higher than you hoped, it almost always means your scope is too big.
In this case, we suggest cutting back to the core, most essential feature set - the handful of features your users absolutely need in order to get value
And aim for something you can ship in 5-6 two-week sprints. You can always add more once it's live and you've validated that your users really need it.
Example Estimate:
Let's walk through an example using the fitness app from earlier.
The MVP has one primary user journey: a user can log a workout and see their history. Most users are on Apple, so we'll start with iOS only.
That's about as lean as a build gets. One core flow, a single platform. So it's a full product team for roughly 5-6 sprints, which puts it in the $250-350K range.
Now add the full vision on top - a social feed, wearable syncing, an AI coach, a video library, and both platforms. That's a bigger team over more sprints, and it pushes the build into the $700K-1M+ range.
It's the same app idea, but the scope of what you build dramatically changes the cost (and the team-time it takes to get there).
The cost mostly mirrors how much you choose to build - which is why it's so important to cut back to only the most essential features to start with.
Why Do Regulated Industries Cost More to Build For?
Some industries cost more to build for than others, mainly because of two things: compliance and integrations.
Compliance
Compliance means you need to build your app to meet a specific set of standards (and being able to prove it).
For example, in healthcare it's HIPAA, which requires you to:
- Encrypt patient data everywhere it moves
- Log every access
- Sign agreements with every vendor that touches the data
- Host on infrastructure that supports all of it
None of the work you have to do for this shows up on the screen. And all of it takes significant engineering time. Fintech is the same story with PCI DSS, identity verification, and security audits.
Integrations
Integrations in these industries tend to be with old, complicated systems. For example:
- A hospital's records system
- A bank's core functionality
- An insurer's claims platform
Connecting to them is far more engineering work than simply calling a modern API (like Stripe, for example). And it usually comes with its own approval process.
Rough Industry Premiums
If you're building in one of these regulated industries, make sure you factor the premium into your estimate.
Compliance is far cheaper to plan for upfront than to scramble to add-on at the last minute.
Studio Can Help You Figure Out What to Build First
The estimate is really a scope conversation in disguise. And hopefully the steps above get you close enough to plan around.
The harder part is deciding what to build first, and that's where a good product team earns its keep.
Studio is a digital product studio. We've designed and shipped apps for brands like QVC, Black Rifle Coffee Company, and alice + olivia, plus many other amazing companies. You can see our portfolio here.
We work as a co-founder, not a vendor. Think of us as your combined CPO & CTO, except we bring the design and engineering teams with us. We can help you decide which problems are worth solving and scope the roadmap. We own the product end to end, including the ongoing work as it grows after launch. The thing we absolutely love the most is scoping a lean MVP, getting it in front of real users fast, and iterating from there. This is the process that drives the most successful apps.
And if you've raised a round and want that capital to turn into a real, shipped product - without the risk and delay of building a team from scratch - that's exactly the kind of work we're built for.
If you'd like help working out what your app should cost and what to include in the initial scope, book a call with us. We'd love to walk through your project and estimate it together.