How much does it cost to build a mobile app? Real numbers, from $186 to six figures

There’s a reason nobody answers this question straight. “It depends” is true, but it’s also useless — so here are actual numbers, where they come from, and what they leave out.

The thing that moves the price most isn’t your feature list. It’s who writes the code. The same app can cost $186 to start or $100,000 depending on whether you build it yourself with an AI assistant, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency. Features matter — I’ll get to them — but they move the price within a route, not between them.

The four ways to get an app built, and what each costs

Whichever route you take, three costs are the same: Apple $99 a year, Google Play $25 once, and a domain at about $12 a year — $136 up front. The domain is for the privacy policy and support pages both stores insist on. That $136 is in every row below, because nobody gets to skip it.

Notice the first two rows start at the same price. Building with an AI coding assistant and building in an AI app builder both begin at roughly $20–$50 a month plus the same $136 — the differences are what you end up owning, and what the bill looks like a month later. The real jump in price is the moment someone else writes the code.

How much does it cost to build an app yourself?

If you’re doing it yourself, the money is small but it isn’t nothing. Here’s the whole first-year bill for a real app on both stores:

• Apple Developer Program — $99 a year. You need it to publish, and — this surprises people — you need it just to run your own app on a real iPhone. Let it lapse and your app comes off the store until you renew.

• Google Play Console — $25, once. You only need it when you publish. You can develop on a real Android phone without paying anything.

• An AI coding assistant — $20 to $100 a month. I use Claude Code. A casual hour here and there sits at the bottom of that range; building all day sits at the top.

• Database and sign-in (Supabase) — free to start, $25 a month later. The free plan will happily run a live app for its first couple of months. You move to Pro when you outgrow it — more users, more data, or the free plan’s habit of pausing a project that’s gone a week without activity.

• Hosting your API (Google Cloud) — a $30 prepayment. Your app’s backend has to live somewhere, and I use Google Cloud. It asks for $30 up front when you turn on billing for a new account; that comes back as credit your API spends over time, and a small app barely touches it. There are other ways to do it — Supabase’s Edge Functions can stand in for a separate API — but they come with problems of their own, which I’m happy to go through on a call.

• A domain — about $12 a year. Both stores want a privacy policy and a support page at a real web address, so you need a domain and a simple site to put them on.

Add it up: $166 up front ($99 + $25 + $30 + $12), then $20 a month for the AI tool, rising to $45 a month when your app outgrows Supabase’s free plan. So your first month costs $186, and every month after that is $20 to $45 — more if you lean on the AI tool all day. That’s the biggest thing AI has changed about making apps. Five years ago the cheapest real route was a freelancer.

But the money was never the expensive part of doing it yourself. Your time is. And the time doesn’t go where people expect — the AI writes the screens happily. It goes on the parts no tutorial covers properly: code signing, build configuration, why the build that worked yesterday fails today, and Apple rejecting your app for a reason you have to read three times to understand. That’s where people stall, sometimes for weeks.

What about AI app builders like Lovable or Bolt?

On the pricing page, they’re not far off the route above: a $20 to $50 monthly plan, plus the same $136 for the stores and a domain once you want to publish. And they’re the fastest way to see your idea on a screen — I’d never talk anyone out of a weekend with one. You’ll have something clickable in an afternoon.

The pricing page isn’t what people end up paying, though. I routinely see people who started on the $20 plan and, a few weeks in, are spending hundreds of dollars a month on credits.

That’s because the trouble arrives around week three. One prompt breaks something three prompts back, the credits go faster than the progress, and you notice what you’ve built is a website in a phone-shaped box — nowhere near the App Store. By then you’re deeply invested in an app you have no idea how to get out. There’s really only one thing these platforms sell: they hide the code and make the architecture decisions for you. In exchange you live inside their ecosystem and keep paying, because getting your app out is too daunting to try.

What most of those people don’t know is how much cheaper the other route is. An AI coding agent like Claude Code does the same heavy lifting, on code that lives on your own computer, for a fixed subscription from $20 a month — and the bill doesn’t climb every time a prompt goes wrong.

That prototype isn’t wasted, though. It’s the best spec you’ll ever write. Hand it to whoever builds the real app — including yourself — and you’ve saved a week of explaining.

How much does a freelancer charge to build an app?

A good one charges $5,000 to $50,000 for a focused first version. You’ll find people on Upwork offering to do it for a few hundred, and that’s the trap: the bids have got cheaper, but the cost hasn’t. A cheap bid doesn’t mean the work is worth less now. It means the market has filled up with people selling skills they don’t have yet — someone who built one app with AI and decided they’re a freelancer, or who’s never worked to a clear scope, a deadline and a client who expects to hear back. What you usually get is a lost month and code nobody can rescue.

Building an app end to end — screens, backend, database, store submission — is a lot of jobs in one, and the freelancers who can genuinely do all of it mostly learned how over a few years inside a company or an agency. So don’t take “experienced” on trust. Ask to see apps they’ve shipped that are live in the stores, and talk to the people who paid for them. Whoever you hire, make sure the Apple and Google accounts are in your name from day one, the code lives in a repository you own, and “done” means live in the stores, not “works on my machine”.

How much does an agency charge?

A full-service agency usually starts at $50,000, and goes past $150,000 for anything with two sides to it, like a marketplace.

You’ll see bigger and smaller numbers quoted, so here’s where the famous one comes from. Clutch, which reviews development companies, says most app projects on its platform land between $10,000 and $50,000 — that includes plenty of small shops, not just agencies. Its widely quoted average of $90,780 is higher than most of those projects because a few very large ones pull it up. If someone tells you the average app costs $90,000, that’s the number they’re misreading.

An agency gives you a team — a designer, a project manager, developers, someone to test it. If you’re a funded company that needs all of that and needs someone accountable for it, that’s real value. If you’re one person with an idea and a budget, most of that money is paying for coordination you don’t need.

What makes one app cost more than another?

Within any route, these are the features that move the number. A two-screen utility and a marketplace with payments are not the same project, and no honest quote pretends they are.

• Payments and subscriptions. In-app purchases go through Apple and Google, each with their own rules, review requirements and test setups. Easily one of the most expensive single features.
• Two kinds of user. A marketplace, a booking app, anything with customers and providers is effectively two apps sharing a database — plus an admin panel to run it.
• Real-time features. Chat, live location, anything where one person’s action has to appear on someone else’s phone instantly.
• AI features. Cheap to add, but they bring a running cost per use that you pay for every user who touches them.
• Sign-in. Much cheaper than it used to be — services like Supabase handle it — but social sign-in with Apple and Google adds configuration on both stores.
• Offline support. An app that has to work without signal and sync later is a genuinely harder app.

The cheapest feature is always the one you cut from version one. Every app I’ve seen get into the stores got there by being smaller than its founder wanted.

What costs come after the app is built?

These apply whoever built it, and they’re the ones no quote mentions:

• The store fees, every year. Apple’s $99 renews annually.
• The stores’ cut of your sales. Apple and Google take a commission on anything digital you sell inside the app — 15% for most small developers once you’re enrolled in their reduced-rate programmes, and up to 30% otherwise. Check their current terms before you build a business model on them; Google changed its fees again in 2026.
• Hosting as you grow. Supabase’s free plan carries you for a while, and Pro’s $25 a month includes a fair amount of usage, but bigger databases, server time and AI usage all grow with your users. By the time these move past the base price, you should have enough users to be charging them something.
• Yearly updates. Apple and Google raise their minimum requirements every year, so an app that nobody touches gradually stops being accepted. Agencies usually budget 15–20% of the build cost per year for maintenance. Doing it yourself, it’s a few days a year.
• Your domain, every year. About $12 to renew, alongside Apple’s fee. The site on it has to stay up too — the stores check for your privacy policy, support page and, for some apps, a way to request account deletion.

How to get an accurate quote

A developer can only quote what you can describe. The single most useful thing you can do before talking to anyone — me included — is write a one-page brief: who it’s for, the screens version one needs, and what you’re happy to leave for later.

This prompt gets you most of the way there. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, fill in your idea, and answer its questions.

I want to build a mobile app and I need to understand what it will cost before I talk to anyone. Help me turn my idea into a one-page brief a developer could quote against.

Here's my idea:
[Describe your app in a few sentences — who it's for, what problem it solves, and what someone does in it on their first day.]

Please:
1. Ask me up to five questions first if anything important is unclear. Wait for my answers before continuing.
2. Write the brief: a one-paragraph summary, who the users are, and the screens version one needs, each with one line on what it does.
3. List every feature that will push the cost up — things like sign-in, payments or subscriptions, chat, maps or location, photo uploads, notifications, AI features, an admin panel, or two different kinds of user — and say for each one why it adds work.
4. Tell me honestly which features I should cut from version one to get into the App Store and Google Play sooner, and what a sensible version two would add back.
5. List the accounts and running costs I'll pay for myself whoever builds it (Apple Developer Program, Google Play Console, hosting, database, any paid APIs).

Keep it in plain English. I'm not technical, so explain any jargon the first time you use it.

When the quotes come back, compare what’s in them, not just the number. The cheapest quote often leaves out store submission, the backend, or anything after launch. This second prompt reads a quote for you and tells you what’s missing:

I've been quoted for building a mobile app and I want to understand it properly before I sign anything. The quote is below.

Go through it and tell me plainly:
1. What's included and what isn't — especially App Store and Google Play submission, fixing rejections from store review, the backend and database, an admin panel, and bug fixes after launch.
2. Who will own what at the end: the source code, the Apple Developer and Google Play accounts, the database and hosting accounts, and any domain. Flag anything that isn't clearly in my name.
3. Whether the price is fixed or hourly, how the payments are staged, and what happens if the scope changes.
4. Any running costs I'll pay after launch that the quote doesn't mention.
5. The questions I should ask the developer before signing, most important first.

Don't tell me whether the price is "fair" — you can't know that. Just make sure I understand exactly what I'm buying.

[Paste the quote here]

So what should you budget?

Straight answer, by situation:

• You’re willing to build it and you have more time than money: budget $166 up front, then $20 a month, and $45 once you outgrow Supabase’s free plan — plus a few months of evenings. Expect to get stuck on deployment and store review — everyone does.
• You want it built properly and you don’t want to touch the code: a proven freelancer or small studio, $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the features above. Get a fixed quote against a written brief, and be wary of anyone far below that.
• You’re a funded business that needs a team and someone accountable: an agency, from around $50,000.