Mobile app development cost calculator

For a US-based team, between about $45,000 for a genuinely small single-platform MVP and $2M+ for a high-scale consumer product with two native apps, real-time infrastructure and a recommendation system. Most funded first releases land between $150,000 and $600,000. The range is wide because "an app" describes a phone icon, not a scope — which is why this site asks sixteen questions instead of one.

Because this one prices US teams only, and it prices a production build rather than a prototype. Most sub-$100,000 figures online assume an offshore team at $25–$50 per hour, a feature list a third the length, and no budget line for QA, DevOps, security or project management. Those four disciplines are roughly a third of a real build. We show them as separate rows so you can see exactly what you are being quoted for elsewhere.

Product planning, UI/UX design, mobile development, backend development, infrastructure engineering, third-party integrations, security and compliance work, QA, DevOps and project management. Excluded, and stated on every result: cloud hosting, third-party service fees, app store fees, content production, marketing, legal counsel and audit or certification fees. Cloud and vendor costs are estimated separately as a monthly figure.

Not as a percentage. Scale changes what gets built. Below roughly 25,000 monthly active users, one well-built service and a managed database carry the product. Past that you need a caching layer, a job queue, read replicas and real monitoring. Past a few hundred thousand you need horizontal scaling, a CDN, partitioned data and load testing against production-shaped data. Each of those is engineering hours, and the results page lists exactly which ones your answers triggered and why.

Yes, and it is usually the right call. A single native iOS app is the cheapest route to a real product. Two native codebases cost about 60% more on the client side — though not on the backend, which is the same either way. React Native or Flutter sits in between at around 25% over a single native app and covers both stores, with native work still needed wherever you touch the camera, background location or payment SDKs.

Two ongoing costs, and they are separate. Cloud infrastructure runs from about $200 per month for a small app to five figures monthly for a media-heavy product at scale — the calculator estimates yours from your traffic, storage and media answers. Maintenance is 15–25% of build cost per year for bug fixes, OS and SDK updates, security patching and small improvements. Budgeting for the build and not for these two is the most common planning mistake we see.

A small single-platform MVP is 2–4 months. A funded consumer product with a custom backend is typically 6–10 months. A two-sided marketplace with two apps, real-time dispatch and payments is 9–14 months. Compressing a schedule by adding people works up to a point and then stops working — the calculator models that, which is why doubling the team does not halve the timeline.

They are accurate as templates and make no claim to be anything else. Each profile describes the shape of that kind of product — the features, the architecture and the scale a US team would plan for in year one. Nobody outside those companies knows their real systems, real infrastructure or real development cost, and this calculator does not pretend to. Every value a template loads is editable in the wizard.

Freelancers at $40–$100 per hour work when you have a technical founder driving the architecture and accepting the coordination load. A small team at $60–$120 is the common choice from funded MVP through Series A. An agency at $100–$180 buys predictability and the disciplines that are invisible until they are missing. Enterprise delivery at $150–$250+ is justified by regulation, multi-region requirements or systems you do not control. The calculator prices all four.

No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted while you work through it. The only data that ever leaves your device is what you deliberately type into the form at the end, after your estimate has already been shown to you in full. See the privacy policy.