How much does it cost to build a mobile app?
Get a realistic estimate for iOS, Android, or cross-platform app development; low, median, and high ranges with a full breakdown.
Mobile app development costs range from $30,000 for a simple MVP to $500,000+ for a complex enterprise app. The median project in 2026 runs $80,000–$150,000. Five factors drive 90% of the variance: platform (iOS, Android, or both), feature complexity, design quality, backend requirements, and team region. Use the calculator below for a project-specific estimate based on Techsy's data from 500+ shipped mobile apps.
Tell us what you're building
Your inputs
05 fieldsNative iOS + Android roughly doubles development hours.
Select all that apply. Each adds 40–200 engineering hours.
Affects blended rate; senior engineers cost 35% more.
Who should use this tool
Founders scoping a mobile app development project before talking to vendors. CTOs and engineering leaders building an annual budget for new product work. Product managers translating a one-line idea into a defensible range for finance. Procurement teams sanity-checking quotes from agencies and contractors.
How we calculate this
We calculate using an hours-based formula. Base app hours are multiplied by platform and complexity factors, then feature hours, design hours, and backend hours are added. QA is estimated at 20% of dev cost and project management at 15%; both industry-standard ranges. The result is multiplied by the regional blended hourly rate. Low and high estimates apply a ±15%/±25% range to account for scope uncertainty.
Data sources
- Techsy internal project database; 500+ mobile projects 2022–2026
- Clutch 2025 Mobile App Development pricing benchmarks
- Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey; regional rates and tooling
- GitHub Octoverse 2024; developer productivity
- Apple App Store Review Guidelines (compliance scope)
- Google Play Console pricing and policies
- GoodFirms 2025 Developer Hourly Rate Benchmarks (named report)
Factors that move the number
Platform choice
Native iOS + Android is roughly 1.8× the hours of a single platform. Cross-platform (React Native, Flutter) lands at about 1.2× a single native platform; most of the code is shared, but platform-specific integrations and App Store compliance still cost real time.
Feature count and complexity
Each feature carries an hour range, not a fixed cost. Chat alone is 150–250 hours because it touches real-time infrastructure, media handling, and notification delivery. Simple features like "login with email" take 40–80 hours including edge cases and security review.
Design quality
Template-based designs run about 60 hours. Standard custom design (10–15 unique screens, design system) takes 160 hours. Premium custom design (motion, illustration, micro-interactions) can exceed 320 hours.
Backend complexity
No backend is the cheapest path but locks you out of core features like sync and accounts. A simple REST API takes 200 hours. A real backend with database, auth, admin, and scalability concerns takes 500+ hours.
Team region and seniority
Blended hourly rates vary 4× across regions: $120 (US/Canada) → $90 (Western Europe) → $45 (Eastern Europe) → $35 (Asia). Senior specialists cost 1.5–2× blended rates. Techsy teams blend senior and mid-level to balance cost and quality.
Compliance and store approval
Apps touching health data (HIPAA), financial data (PCI-DSS), or EU user data (GDPR) add 15–25% to total cost in security review, audit trails, and data-handling infrastructure.
Maintenance (not included in build estimate)
Annual maintenance typically runs 15–20% of the original build cost. Budget for OS updates, SDK migrations, bug fixes, and minor feature additions.
How to reduce cost
Ship the smallest version of the app that proves your core hypothesis. Three to five features is plenty for v1, even though every founder we work with wants to launch with fifteen. The features that get cut almost never get missed by real users, and the ones that do come back as feature requests with built-in product validation. Cutting v1 scope by half typically cuts cost by 40 to 60% because complexity compounds: every screen interacts with every other screen.
Cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Flutter let you ship to iOS and Android from one codebase, which typically cuts development time by 30 to 40%. The trade-off is mostly in the long tail: hardware-heavy features like camera pipelines, AR, or audio processing still need native code, and the framework itself becomes a dependency you have to keep current. For roughly 80% of consumer apps the math is clearly favorable. For graphics-intensive or hardware-coupled apps it usually is not.
Skip custom design and start with Material Design or Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Both come with hundreds of pre-built components, defined typography, spacing, and motion patterns that already feel native on each platform. You save 100 to 200 design hours and ship with a UI users immediately understand. Custom design becomes worth paying for once you have product-market fit and need to differentiate on brand. Until then, you are paying a premium for users to relearn buttons.
Push the admin dashboard to v2 and run early operations through a spreadsheet plus a few SQL queries. Most apps under 1,000 users do not need a custom admin tool. Engineering an admin panel is typically 150 to 200 hours of work that mostly serves your team, not your customers. Once you cross the threshold where manual ops break, you will know exactly which fields and actions belong in the admin tool, which makes the eventual build cheaper and better.
Pick a team in Western or Eastern Europe rather than the US or UK. You get senior engineers at $50 to $90 per hour instead of $120 to $200, with comparable quality, English fluency, and overlap with most working hours. Eastern Europe is particularly strong for backend, DevOps, and React Native. The savings compound: a 1,500-hour build saves $90K to $150K just on rate arbitrage, money you can reinvest in design, marketing, or a second iteration.
Switch from hourly to fixed-price billing once the spec stabilizes. Hourly works for discovery and prototyping where scope is genuinely unknown, but it transfers all the estimation risk to you. Fixed-price on a clear spec aligns incentives: the agency owns scope creep and rework. We typically run discovery hourly, then move to fixed-price milestones for build. Expect a 10 to 15% premium on the fixed quote, which is cheap insurance against an open-ended bill.
Cost by region and app type
| App type | US/Canada | Western Europe | Eastern Europe | Asia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MVP (1 platform) | $45K–$80K | $30K–$55K | $18K–$35K | $14K–$28K |
| Standard (both platforms) | $150K–$240K | $100K–$160K | $55K–$95K | $45K–$80K |
| Advanced (both + backend) | $280K–$450K | $180K–$300K | $100K–$170K | $80K–$140K |
| Enterprise | $500K+ | $350K+ | $200K+ | $170K+ |
FAQ
Questions we get every week
The short answers, written in plain language. If your question isn’t here,
Production mobile apps land between $30,000 and $500,000+. Our median 2026 project for SMBs runs $80K–$150K. A lean MVP on a single platform starts around $30K. Compliance-heavy enterprise apps regularly cross $300K; HIPAA and PCI work alone adds 15–25% to scope.
The dev hours are nearly identical. iOS gets a slight edge because there are roughly 30 active iPhones to test against versus thousands of Android device variants. That fragmentation adds 10–15% to QA on Android. If you only ship one platform, pick by where your users live, not by cost.
MVP: 2–4 months. Standard app: 4–6 months. App with backend: 6–9 months. Enterprise: 9–18 months. Adding people stops helping past five or six engineers; Brooks's Law shows up fast.
An MVP targets one core flow with minimum polish. It runs 30–50% of full product cost. Full product covers onboarding, settings, admin, edge cases, and two or three rounds of post-launch iteration. Most founders underestimate the full number by 2–3×.
Yes, typically 30–45% versus native iOS plus Android. React Native and Flutter share 70–85% of code across platforms. The remaining native code handles camera, payments, and deep linking. Skip cross-platform for AR-heavy, graphics-intensive, or hardware-specific apps.
Annual maintenance runs 15–20% of original build cost. That covers iOS and Android OS updates, SDK migrations every 12–18 months, bug fixes, and minor features. Budget $10K–$80K per year depending on app complexity.
Apple Developer Program ($99/yr), Google Play Console ($25 one-time), ASO tools, analytics, crash reporting, backend hosting, CDN, and support tooling. Combined, they add $3K–$15K per year per app.
Yes; single platform, 3–4 features, template design, minimal backend, Eastern Europe or Asia team. That ships for $15K–$30K. Don't go this route if design quality or security is a competitive moat for you.
An Instagram-style MVP; feed, posting, profiles, chat, push; costs $250K–$600K. Scaling that to millions of users adds $500K+ in backend infra and DevOps. Real Instagram burned tens of millions in its first five years. Don't underestimate scale engineering.
Three reasons. Team composition: one senior engineer estimates differently than five mid-level engineers. Scope interpretation: "chat" means text only to one team and voice plus video plus presence to another. Regional pricing: US agencies are 2–4× the cost of comparable offshore options. Compare proposals line-by-line on scope, not on totals.
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