What a mobile app actually costs in 2026

"How much will the app cost?" is the first question on almost every call, and the honest answer is that it depends less on the app than on how you choose to get it built. There are three ways to do it, and each one prices something different.

Three ways to get an app built

Hire someone. You pay a salary for as long as they're on the team, plus everything around a salary: taxes, benefits, equipment, recruiting. You get someone who stays and learns your product deeply. You also wait: finding and onboarding a good senior mobile engineer usually takes two to three months before the first line of code.

Hire an agency. You pay an hourly or weekly rate for a team. It moves fast and covers design, engineering and QA at once. The bill grows with every change of mind, and the people who built it leave when the contract ends.

Fixed price, fixed scope. You agree on what gets built, for one price, before work starts. It's the most predictable option and the one that forces the hardest, most useful conversation: what does the first version actually need?

None of these is always right. A product that needs mobile work every week for years needs a person on the team. A first version that needs to exist in two months usually doesn't.

What a hire costs

These are the rough, fully loaded yearly figures I use when a founder asks me to compare (salary plus the usual overhead), for a senior mobile engineer. They move with the market and with seniority, so treat them as a ballpark, not a quote.

Add the months spent recruiting, and the time a founder spends managing someone in a skill they may not have themselves.

What actually drives the price

Two apps with the same number of screens can differ by five times in cost. What moves the number:

what a quote counts: screenswhat it costs

Flows

sign-up, payments, the core loop

Backend

managed or custom

Native features

calling, widgets, camera

AI

reliable, private, safe when wrong

Store review

privacy, subscriptions, listing

Design quality

the small decisions

• Flows, not screens. Sign-up, payments, onboarding and the core loop are where the work is. A settings screen is cheap; a checkout that handles failed cards, refunds and receipts is not.
• The backend. A managed backend like Supabase or Convex removes months of work. Custom infrastructure adds them back.
• Native features. Calling (CallKit), widgets, Live Activities, background location and the camera need native code on top of React Native or Flutter. They're very doable, and they're never "just one more screen".
• AI. A model call is cheap to add and expensive to make reliable: prompts, guardrails, privacy, and what happens when it's wrong.
• Getting through review. App Store and Google Play review, privacy labels, subscriptions and screenshots are real work, usually underestimated.
• Design quality. An app that feels expensive is a few dozen small decisions that worked. I wrote about what those are.

What I charge

Every project is a fixed price agreed before I start, half up front:

• Audit, $300. Two to three days. A marked-up review of your app with fixes ranked by impact.
• Revamp, from $2,500. Three to five weeks. Your core flows redesigned and built into your app.
• Full product, from $5,000. Six to ten weeks. Every flow, a design system, onboarding, a paywall and the launch, with a month of fixes after.

If you need someone embedded with your team instead, I also work on monthly contracts, part-time or full-time.

You install and test every build on your own phone while it's being made, not only at the end. You own the code and the designs.

Price yours

Pick what your app needs and see the range. It's the same calculator as on the cost page.

Spending less without shipping less

• Cut scope, not quality. One flow done properly beats five done halfway, and it's cheaper to extend than to fix.
• Pick boring infrastructure. Expo for the app, a managed backend, RevenueCat for subscriptions. You pay for your product, not for plumbing.
• Ship to testers early. TestFlight in week two catches the expensive misunderstandings while they're still cheap.
• Decide what "done" means up front. Most budget overruns are a scope that was never written down.

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I've shipped 27 apps, including ChartDetector AI for 150K+ traders and Ringo, an AI business phone. If you want a fixed price for your app, send me what you're building and I'll come back with a scope and a number.