Every founder asks how much does a mobile app cost?The honest answer is: it depends on a list of decisions you haven't made yet. Anyone who quotes a number before walking through that list is guessing — and you'll pay for the guess later.
The question behind the question
What people usually mean is: can I afford this?That's a fair question, and it has a useful answer once we know four things.
- How many platforms? (iOS, Android, both?)
- How much backend does it need?
- How much real-time, offline, or media handling is involved?
- How polished does the UI need to be on day one?
What actually drives cost
- Platform count.A cross-platform build with React Native or Flutter is roughly 1.3× the cost of a single-platform native build, not 2×. Two native apps is roughly 1.8×. The math almost always favours cross-platform until you're hitting platform-specific performance limits.
- Backend complexity. A read-mostly app with a thin API is a fraction of the cost of a real-time multiplayer system. Most apps are closer to the first.
- Integrations. Every third-party SDK is a small tax — auth, analytics, payments, maps, push, in-app purchase. Five SDKs is a week. Fifteen is a month, much of it spent on edge cases.
- Design fidelity.A "works fine" UI ships in weeks. A "feels like a Linear or Things app" UI takes months and a designer with strong opinions.
- App store review. Not a development cost, but a timeline cost. Build review cycles into the calendar.
Honest ranges
Rough ranges, 2026A simple cross-platform MVP with a thin backend: 10–14 weeks, two to three engineers. A polished consumer app with a real backend and real-time features: 4–6 months, three to four engineers plus a designer. Anything claimed faster than this is either copying a template or skipping the parts that bite later.
We don't publish hourly rates because they're not how software gets quoted in our shop. The shape of the engagement is in services.
Where you can save without regret
- Skip the marketing website on launch. Use a Notion page or a Framer site.
- Skip the admin panel. Use Postgres + Retool or Metabase until you're past 1,000 users.
- Skip the elaborate onboarding. Three screens at most.
- Skip the dark mode toggle on v1. Pick one theme. Ship it.
Where you should not save: testing, error reporting, app store assets, and the first launch's perceived performance. Those are the things users notice and reviewers punish.
If you have a brief, we'll scope it honestly.
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