Most founders don’t lose money because apps are inherently expensive. They lose money because quotes hide what drives cost, what slows delivery, and what actually needs to be built first.
By Liam Kim
If you ask ten app agencies how much app development costs, you can get ten wildly different answers and all of them can be technically true.
A simple mobile app might come in around $15,000. A serious consumer product can land between $80,000 and $350,000. A complex enterprise build with compliance, heavy integrations, or advanced data systems can push past $500,000 and keep going. That spread sounds absurd until you understand what you're actually paying for.
The real question is not "How much does an app cost?" It is: what kind of app, built how, by whom, on what timeline, with what level of operational responsibility after launch?
Why app development quotes are all over the place
App development pricing is famously slippery because "an app" is not a product category in the way a laptop or office chair is. A meditation timer, a retail loyalty app, a two-sided marketplace, and a HIPAA-aware patient experience app all live under the same label while requiring completely different levels of design, engineering, testing, and support.
In 2026, most market estimates cluster somewhere between $40,000 and $400,000 for mobile apps, but that average hides the important part: complexity compounds quickly.
A basic app with login, profiles, and a dashboard often falls in the $16,000 to $32,000 range. Add payments, social features, or more involved user flows and that often moves into roughly $32,000 to $48,000. Once you bring in advanced features such as AI-assisted functionality, AR/VR, or enterprise-grade workflows, projects often start around $72,000 and can rise dramatically from there.
Time follows the same pattern. Basic apps often take 2 to 6 months. Moderate projects commonly run 4 to 9 months. Advanced products stretch to 7 to 12 months, and enterprise systems can take a year or more.
That is why two honest shops can quote the same idea very differently: one is pricing the visible screens, the other is pricing the hidden work required to make those screens reliable in production.
What actually drives the cost of an app
The biggest cost driver is not the number of screens. It is the amount of custom logic behind them.
A login screen looks cheap. A login system with password resets, email verification, account recovery, fraud protection, user roles, moderation rules, auditability, and push notification preferences is not.
Here are the cost levers that matter most:
Cost driver
What it affects
Feature complexity
Payments, chat, booking logic, feeds, admin rules, and permissions expand scope fast
Platform choice
Building separate native iOS and Android apps usually costs much more than using a shared cross-platform approach
Backend requirements
Custom workflows, integrations, analytics pipelines, and heavy business logic increase engineering time
Design depth
Custom UI/UX work often adds $3,000 to $30,000 on its own
QA and edge cases
Device testing, bug fixing, and release hardening are often underestimated
Post-launch operations
Hosting, monitoring, storage, notifications, and updates continue after launch
This is where many first-time founders get blindsided. They assume the quote covers "the app," but much of the budget disappears into specification, revisions, QA, deployment work, and all the things nobody notices unless they break.
Simple apps are often estimated at 300 to 800 hours. Advanced features can add hundreds more. AI-heavy projects commonly exceed 1,200 hours. Blockchain projects can push past 2,000 hours. At standard agency or senior freelance rates, that math gets expensive very quickly.
Typical app development cost by app type
App type
Typical cost range
Why
Basic utility or MVP
$15,000–$50,000
Simple flows, limited backend, small feature set
Retail or education app
$7,500–$100,000
Broad range depending on accounts, payments, and content systems
Healthcare app
$10,000–$70,000
Costs rise fast with compliance and sensitive data handling
Compliance, integrations, security, analytics, internal systems
Platform choice matters too. A native iOS build may range from roughly $25,000 to $250,000. Android often lands in a similar band. If you want separate native apps for both platforms, total costs commonly rise to $120,000 to $300,000 or more.
Agencies, freelancers, and DIY tools: what you really get
Approach
Typical cost
Timeline
What you get
Main risk
Agency
$19,200–$150,000+
3–12+ months
Full team
Expensive, slow
Freelancer
$15,000–$50,000+
Varies
Lower entry cost
Single point of failure
DIY / low-code
$15,000–$50,000
2–4 months
Faster validation
Limited production readiness
Managed service
Lower entry cost
Faster
Full lifecycle handled
Requires scope discipline
The hidden costs founders miss
The biggest budgeting mistake is treating launch as the finish line.
Post-launch costs are real and predictable. Maintenance alone often runs 15% to 20% of the initial build cost annually. Then there is infrastructure: hosting, storage, notifications, monitoring, analytics, bug fixes, OS updates, and product changes that only surface after real users arrive.
This is where the "cheap build" often becomes the expensive option.
A founder might save money upfront, then discover they still need to pay for deployment fixes, backend infrastructure, ongoing updates, bug handling, and even replacement developers.
Why the traditional model breaks down
This is exactly where the traditional model breaks down.
High costs in app development are not just a result of complexity. They are a result of how the work is structured.
In most cases, everything is fragmented. One team handles design. Another handles development. Someone else manages backend systems. QA, deployment, and post-launch operations are often separate layers entirely.
That fragmentation creates overhead. It slows everything down, increases coordination cost, and turns even simple changes into expensive work.
AppBuildChat approaches this differently.
Instead of separating everything, it combines the right parts.
AI is used to structure and translate ideas into a clear, production-ready specification. Not a vague concept, but something that defines the product properly from the start.
Then experienced specialists step in where it actually matters. Design experts shape the user experience. Engineers handle system reliability and performance. Backend specialists ensure the infrastructure works at scale.
Each part is handled by the right level of expertise, but only where it is needed.
This combination is what changes the economics.
AI removes unnecessary time and ambiguity. Experts focus only on the decisions and work that require real judgment.
That is how you reduce both cost and complexity without sacrificing quality.
And once the structure changes, the pricing can change too.
Instead of paying a large upfront cost for development, followed by separate costs for hosting, updates, bug fixes, and feature changes, everything is structured into a single, predictable model.
AppBuildChat runs on a $299/month subscription.
That includes development, deployment, hosting, maintenance, and ongoing updates. Not as separate line items, but as part of one continuous service.
This matters because most of the real cost of an app does not happen at build. It happens after launch.
Updates, infrastructure, bug fixes, and small changes quietly accumulate over time.
In traditional models, those are additional invoices.
In this model, they are expected.
You are not paying for a one-time build. You are paying for the app to exist, run, and improve without friction.
So what should you expect to pay?
If you want the honest answer, here it is.
If your goal is a real, store-ready mobile app, traditional pricing will almost always start higher than most first-time founders expect.
For many professionally built apps, $40,000 is not a high quote. It is the starting point.
If your product requires advanced AI, deep backend systems, or enterprise-level compliance, six figures is normal and seven figures is not unusual.
If your goal is a lightweight MVP, then $15,000 to $50,000 can be realistic — but only if the scope is tightly constrained.
At that point, the real decision is not just cost.
It is how much of the process you want to manage yourself.
In traditional models, the work does not end at development. Hosting, maintenance, updates, bug fixes, and ongoing changes continue as separate responsibilities — and separate costs.
That is what makes apps expensive over time.
Some newer approaches restructure this entirely by treating the app not as a one-time build, but as an ongoing product with continuous support.
AppBuildChat follows that model.
In most cases, a production-ready mobile app can be delivered in as little as 7 days, depending on scope — significantly faster than traditional development timelines.
It takes an idea, turns it into a structured specification, builds a production-ready mobile app, and handles ongoing operations as one unified process.
If you want to understand how that works, you can explore Support. And if you want to see what a production-ready app actually looks like, you can See Examples.
Because in the end, people are not just buying software.
They are buying relief from having to orchestrate the entire process themselves.
