Streaming & entertainment · United States · USD
Cost to build an app like Amazon Prime Video
A Prime Video-like app mixes subscription streaming with transactional video: rent, buy and subscribe to third-party channels inside one catalogue. That commercial mix is what makes it expensive. Every title needs to know which of several entitlement paths grants access, and the store has to handle one-off purchases alongside recurring billing.
What you are actually building
An app like Amazon Prime Video is three or four screens people recognise sitting on a great deal of engineering they never see. These are the screens that define the shape — and the part of each one that costs real money.
The browse grid is the cheap part
Rows, artwork and a merchandising order take a fortnight. It is the screen every mockup opens with and the least of the engineering.
The player is where the money goes
HLS and DASH, adaptive bitrate, subtitles, Chromecast and AirPlay, and a playhead that resumes on a different device.
Offline downloads mean DRM
Widevine on Android, FairPlay on iOS, a licence server and an encrypted local store with expiry — routinely 8 to 12% of the build.
Price your own version
The calculator below is preloaded with the Amazon Prime Video template — its features, architecture and a planning scale for year one. Remove what you do not need, add what you do, and the estimate follows.
Building an app like Amazon Prime Video
A starting template, not a specification. Every feature, number and technology choice below is yours to change.
Reference template
Amazon Prime Video
A Prime Video-like app mixes subscription streaming with transactional video: rent, buy and subscribe to third-party channels inside one catalogue. That commercial mix is what makes it expensive. Every title needs to know which of several entitlement paths grants access, and the store has to handle one-off purchases alongside recurring billing.
- Preloaded features
- 15
- Category
- Video & music streaming
The browse grid is the cheap part
Rows, artwork and a merchandising order take a fortnight. It is the screen every mockup opens with and the least of the engineering.
The player is where the money goes
HLS and DASH, adaptive bitrate, subtitles, Chromecast and AirPlay, and a playhead that resumes on a different device.
Offline downloads mean DRM
Widevine on Android, FairPlay on iOS, a licence server and an encrypted local store with expiry — routinely 8 to 12% of the build.
What makes an Amazon Prime Video-like app expensive
Three things dominate this shape of product. Everything else is comparatively ordinary app development.
Mixed entitlement model
Subscription, rental with an expiry clock, permanent purchase and channel add-ons — resolved per title, per profile, per device.
Transactional storefront
A purchase flow inside a streaming app means in-app purchase rules, receipt validation and refund handling on top of your own billing.
Channel partners
Third-party channels bring partner onboarding, revenue share and separate content pipelines.
Cost breakdown for the default template
Before you change anything. Costed at the midpoint of a $118–$155/hr blended US rate.
Features in an Amazon Prime Video-like app
The starting list, longest build first — each bar is that feature’s share of the biggest one, so you can see where the hours actually go. Every row is a checkbox in the calculator above: this is a template, not a specification.
Core features (13)
808h totalAdvanced features (2)
338h totalIntegrations (5)
- Stripe
- Apple Pay
- AWS
- Amplitude / Mixpanel
- Sentry / Datadog (monitoring)
How long, and who builds it
The $650,000–$1,062,000 figure assumes this schedule and this team. Both scale with the answers in the calculator above — and neither is a quote.
Delivery timeline — 9–12 months
- Discovery & product definition4–5 wks
- UI/UX design6–8 wks
- Development (app + backend)19–28 wks
- Integrations & infrastructure5–7 wks
- QA & security testing5–7 wks
- Store submission & launch2–3 wks
The team — 7 people
- Product manager1×
- UI/UX designer1×
- Mobile developer1×
- Backend developer1×
- DevOps / SRE1×½
- QA engineer1×
- Data / ML engineer1×
The phases add to more than the total on purpose: design starts before discovery finishes and QA runs alongside development rather than after it. 7 people is about 6.5 full-time equivalents — a smaller team takes proportionally longer, and a much larger one does not go proportionally faster. The two roles most often missing from a first plan are DevOps and QA, which together are 16% of this build.
Technology considerations
A stack that would serve this product shape well. A recommendation for what you could build — not a claim about what Amazon Prime Video runs.
| Layer | Suggestion |
|---|---|
| Mobile | Native iOS and Android, plus TV targets if living-room playback matters |
| Backend | Node.js or Go services behind an API gateway |
| Database | PostgreSQL for catalogue and entitlements, DynamoDB or Cassandra for playback state |
| Cache | Redis for catalogue reads and continue-watching |
| Search | OpenSearch for title and person search |
| Cloud | AWS |
| Object storage | S3 with intelligent tiering |
| CDN | CloudFront with a multi-CDN fallback |
| Media pipeline | MediaConvert or an equivalent transcode ladder, HLS and DASH packaging, Widevine and FairPlay DRM |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch plus Datadog, with playback QoE dashboards |
| ML serving | A managed inference endpoint (SageMaker, Vertex AI) with an offline evaluation pipeline |
Top cost drivers
- 1
Medium scale traffic and usage18% of the build
Caching, queues and real monitoring become mandatory. That is real engineering: caching layer (redis or equivalent) in front of hot reads; background job queue for anything slower than a request; read replicas and query-level database tuning. Lower your year-one traffic assumptions and this shrinks immediately.
- 2
Advanced backend architecture10% of the build
Needed when traffic is high enough, or spiky enough, that a single service cannot absorb it and a slow endpoint takes the whole product down with it.
- 3
iOS + Android, native5% of the build
Two separate native codebases means the client is built twice. Moving to React Native or Flutter would cut roughly a third of your mobile hours, at the cost of native modules wherever you touch device hardware.
- 4
5 third-party integrations4% of the build
Every external service is code you write, failure modes you handle and an API that will change without asking you. The ones you can defer are the cheapest scope cuts available.
- 5
High security posture4% of the build
Controls, hardening, audit logging and penetration testing. Retrofitting these after launch typically costs two to three times as much as building them in.
- 6
Premium design3% of the build
Roughly 24 screens with research, motion and accessibility work. Dropping to Custom would save a meaningful share of this without making the product look unfinished.
Infrastructure and maintenance
Neither of these is part of the build figure, and neither of them stops.
Cloud infrastructure
$2K – $11K/month
- Baseline environment$120–$420
- Application compute$675–$2,400
- Database$27–$108
- Object storage$105–$130
- CDN & bandwidth$288–$649
- Media transcoding$250–$667
Annual maintenance
$98K – $266K/year
15–25% of build cost per year: bug fixes, iOS and Android version updates, SDK and dependency upgrades, security patching and small improvements. Cloud costs are the separate figure alongside.
Building an app like Amazon Prime Video — common questions
How much does it cost to build an app like Amazon Prime Video?
Using this site's default profile — 15 features, ios + android, native, a advanced backend and medium scale traffic — the estimate is $650,000 to $1,062,000 for a US team, or roughly 6,118 engineering hours at a blended $118–$155 per hour. That figure covers design, both apps, backend, infrastructure, integrations, security, QA, DevOps and project management. It excludes cloud hosting, vendor fees, marketing and legal. Change any answer in the calculator on this page and the number moves with it.
How long does it take to build an app like Amazon Prime Video?
About 9–12 months with the team this estimate assumes — 7 people, roughly 6.5 full-time equivalents. Discovery and design run first and partly in parallel, development takes about half the calendar, and QA overlaps the back half rather than following it. A smaller team takes proportionally longer; a much larger one does not go proportionally faster, which is why compressing this schedule costs more than it saves below a certain point.
What team do you need to build an app like Amazon Prime Video?
1× product manager, 1× ui/ux designer, 1× mobile developer, 1× backend developer, 1× devops / sre (part-time), 1× qa engineer, 1× data / ml engineer. That is what 6,118 hours of work distributed across 10 disciplines actually requires. The roles people most often leave out of their own plan are DevOps and QA, which together are about 16% of this build.
What does an app like Amazon Prime Video cost to run each month?
Cloud infrastructure is estimated at $1,915 to $10,824 per month at the scale this profile assumes, driven mainly by media delivery and transcoding. Third-party services add $80 to $4,500. Separately, budget $98,000 to $266,000 a year for maintenance — bug fixes, OS and SDK updates and security patching. None of these are part of the build figure.
Why is a rental model harder than a subscription?
A subscription is one boolean per user. Rentals are per-title state with start times, expiry windows, device limits and offline grace periods — and every one of them has to be enforced in the player, not just the API.
Do Apple and Google take a cut?
On in-app purchases, yes — 15–30% depending on your revenue tier and programme eligibility. It is a business model question that should be settled before the payment architecture is designed, not after.