How Much Does It Cost To Make an App?

App development costs are shaped by dozens of variables across design, infrastructure, team composition, feature complexity, ongoing maintenance, and more. Understanding these cost drivers is necessary for building realistic budgets and communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.

This article will break down app development costs by addressing what adds to each component or stage, before rounding it out with fact-driven numbers and estimates.

How We Estimated Time & Cost
The estimates in this guide are based on a synthesis of publicly available benchmarks and data drawn from:

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics salary data
• Clutch.co case studies and agency breakdowns
• Toptal freelance rate benchmarks
• Arc.dev freelance developer rates
• Gun.io freelance developer pricing
• Agency RFP templates and whitepapers

The ranges discussed reflect U.S.-based teams, but actual timelines and costs vary based on team composition, location, tooling, and product complexity.

App Development Cost Overview

Before we get into more detail on app development costs, here's a quick overview based on complexity.

Complexity tiers give a framework for mapping features, required infrastructure, and developer effort to a realistic budget.

Here are some notes on the costs for these tiers:

• Simple apps: Use the least expensive setup with minimal cloud resources, mostly free-tier services, and basic CI/CD pipelines. Costs are driven more by development than infrastructure.

• Medium-complexity apps: Require a higher monthly infrastructure spend, like autoscaling servers and mid-tier monitoring tools, as well as more developer time for integration.

• Complex apps: Carry the highest infrastructure overhead, like multi-region deployments, enterprise-grade security, and advanced observability. These also require larger teams and longer timelines.

Below is a unified view of costs based on the discussion in the later sections of this guide.

You can extend these ranges either way by altering team composition and using more or less expensive tooling and infrastructure.

What Key Factors Affect the Price of an App?

The cost of making an app can broadly be divided into three categories. 

People and Process

This category ‌covers everything before and during development to ensure your app is well-planned, usable, and reliable.

Tech and Infrastructure

The technology and tooling needed to build, deploy, and run your app fall under this category. These costs are often underestimated because most remain ongoing expenses.

Risk and Post-Launch

This category of expenses accounts for everything that happens after release and the measures required to protect your app, users, and business from costly risks.

Costs of Employing, Infrastructure, and More

The real-world costs of development break down into human resources, infrastructure, tooling, and miscellaneous expenses.

People and Salaries

Understanding typical wage benchmarks helps estimate the staffing cost required for different stages of app development.

There are a few important points to remember while looking at this data.

• Hiring costs: These rates only indicate salaries for these professionals. There will be additional costs if your business doesn't have these people on hand and hiring is required.

• Contractor vs full-time: Full-time employees are subject to benefits, while contract or freelance workers are paid a per-project or hourly wage.

• Overlap: With some applications, combining roles and assigning them to one employee is fairly common. However, assigning multiple roles to one employee might introduce inefficiency.

• Staffing changes: Staffing needs often change throughout the project lifecycle. For example, you may need more developers during active feature development, but fewer once the product enters maintenance.

Infrastructure

Depending on the size of your app, the cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure can be one of the biggest cost drivers.

Before getting into the recurring costs, let's discuss some of the one-time costs in app development.

• Play/App Store registration: The Apple Developer program charges $99/year, while the Google Play Console charges a one-time $25 fee.

• Domain and SSL setup: Purchasing your app's domain and SSL certificate (often free with hosting, but premium SSL certificates can cost extra).

• Legal work: Drafting T&C, privacy policies, and performing initial compliance reviews.

• Hardware for developers/testers: Buying physical devices for testing (like phones and tablets) or dedicated Mac hardware for iOS development.

Though there are ballpark estimates that established companies stick to, infrastructure prices can vary between different vendors. Below are the price ranges of some of the most popular software for building app infrastructure.

Tools for Improving Efficiency

Though the tools mentioned in this section aren't mandatory (and free alternatives are available for many), they are the industry standard.

Here's a pricing snapshot:

Other Expenses

Beyond salaries, infrastructure, and core tooling, there are several miscellaneous costs that add up:

• APIs and SDK licensing: Some APIs charge per use or per transaction, which can scale up quickly with user growth. 

• Third-party services: Services like feature flag management, A/B testing platforms, and analytics tools often move from free to paid tiers once usage thresholds are crossed.

• Beta testing and feedback: Services like TestFlight (iOS), Firebase App Distribution, or paid beta testers add minor but recurring costs.

• App marketing and distribution: Costs for user acquisition campaigns, App Store Optimization, and paid ads to drive installs.

How to Reduce Development Costs (Without Compromising Quality)

Let's look at some ways to save capital without sacrificing quality.

Build Your MVP First

Building an MVP before scaling lets you assess features and complexity before going all-in. The following are the five core points of lean product development:

1. Identify what matters most to users and uncover the reasons behind it.

2. Simplify workflows to eliminate unnecessary tasks.

3. Refine operations so that each stage contributes meaningful value.

4. Encourage independence and ownership across and within teams.

5. Evolve the product continuously through ongoing refinement.

Focus on delivering as much value as possible first, and refining your product later. 

Use Open-Source and Pre-Built Solutions

As mentioned earlier, using open-source frameworks, pre-built solutions, and third-party APIs and SDKs can reduce costs when developing web and mobile applications, while promising well-maintained tools.

Some components are often better bought than built, like chat, video feeds, user authentication, push notifications, payment gateways, and search/recommendations.

Here are some popular APIs, SDKs, and open-source solutions for their respective categories:

Some tools, like Stream, allow you to create a free account to build a prototype. It's recommended to check out and compare the pros and cons of these solutions before committing to one.

Cross-Platform Development

Building separate apps for different platforms can be very costly. Cross-platform app development frameworks like Flutter, React Native, and Kotlin Multiplatform let you develop once for multiple platforms.

Cross-platform development is especially useful for budget-conscious startups that want to reach a wide audience.

Compared to native apps, these tools can limit developers in using platform-specific features. However, they're generally easier to work with and significantly cheaper to implement.

How Much Do Different Types of Apps Cost To Make?

This section will look at different types of apps and what they'd cost to develop. 

Ridesharing

Building a ridesharing app is development-heavy because it depends on real-time location, routing, and continuous server communication.

Below is a breakdown of developer time and cost by feature:

Fitness Tracker

Fitness apps lean heavily on sensor data and offline functionality, which increases QA complexity for every feature.

Social Media App

Social apps are compute-intensive, requiring high storage, low latency, and moderation infrastructure.

App Cost Tracking and Estimation Tools 

Here are some cost estimation tools you can check to get a better understanding of your application costs:

• Digitalya App Cost Calculator: The Digitalya App Cost Estimator is easy to use and gives both cost and timeline estimates. It also generates a downloadable PDF report, so teams can share and compare estimates with stakeholders.

• App Development Cost: This tool gives a quick questionnaire and shows cost and timeline ranges. It also breaks down how features affect the total and provides a spec report for vendor comparisons.

• Goodbudget: While designed for personal finance, it can be repurposed by small teams to set app budgets, track spending, and compare actual costs to estimates. Its envelope-style system makes it easy to allocate money across different parts of the project.

• EstimateMyApp: This one provides a guided questionnaire that asks about your app's features, design complexity, and backend needs. Based on your inputs, it generates a detailed cost estimate and timeline, which can help teams align expectations with stakeholders before moving forward.

Conclusion

The numbers discussed in this guide represent industry averages and should be used as guidelines rather than absolutes. The actual cost of developing an app can vary significantly depending on a myriad of factors.

No matter which of the combinations of choices you make while building an app, make sure to align your app budget and strategy with your organization's long-term goals. Careful planning at the start goes a long way to avoid costly mistakes later.