How much does mobile app development cost?

Mobile app quotes vary more wildly than any other kind of software work — the same brief can come back at $4,000 and at $40,000. That spread isn't randomness; it reflects genuinely different products hiding behind the same one-page description. Here's how the pricing actually breaks down, and why your own quote will be scoped rather than picked off a list.

Cost bands for mobile apps

These are indicative bands, and they assume one React Native codebase serving both iOS and Android. Commissioning two separate native teams for the same scope typically adds 60–90% — not a clean 100%, because design and backend work is shared, but far more than most budgets anticipate.

Why cross-platform changes the economics

The single biggest lever on app cost is whether you write the feature set once or twice. With React Native you build one codebase, and drop to native modules only for the small number of features that genuinely need them — heavy camera processing, complex background work, specific hardware APIs.

There's a second-order saving people miss. Two native codebases don't just cost twice to build; they cost twice to maintain, twice to test, and they drift. Every feature request thereafter is scoped, built, reviewed, and QA'd twice, forever.

The costs that aren't in the quote

Mobile has a structurally higher ongoing cost than web, and this is where first-time app owners get caught. Web apps you can neglect for a year and they keep working. Mobile apps decay.

• Store fees: $99/year for Apple, one-off $25 for Google.
• Annual OS releases: iOS and Android each ship changes yearly that can break your app. Budget maintenance to keep up whether or not you add features.
• Store policy changes: privacy declarations, permission rules, and account-deletion requirements have all forced app updates in recent years.
• Backend and infrastructure: typically $50–$500/month at early scale, growing with usage.
• Push notifications, crash reporting, and analytics tooling: often free at low volume, then metered.
• App store optimisation and screenshots: a real, recurring marketing cost, not a one-off design task.

A reasonable planning figure for annual maintenance is 15–20% of the original build cost, purely to keep the app functioning and compliant — before any new features.

Where to cut, and where not to

Safe to cut in v1

• Social login beyond one provider — pick the one your users actually have.
• In-app chat. Almost always premature, and expensive to do well.
• Tablet-optimised layouts, unless your users are demonstrably on tablets.
• Onboarding tours. Fix the confusing screen instead of narrating it.
• Dark mode, unless your audience expects it as table stakes.

Expensive to cut

• Offline handling, if your users work in poor connectivity. Retrofitting it means rewriting your data layer.
• Analytics and event tracking. Launching blind means your next round of decisions is guesswork.
• Crash reporting. Without it you learn about problems from one-star reviews.
• A sane data model. The cheapest thing to get right first and the most expensive thing to fix later.

One question that predicts your real budget

Does your app need to work reliably without a network connection? If yes, you're in the upper half of every band above, because offline-first means local storage, a sync engine, and conflict resolution — genuine distributed-systems work. If no, you can ship a good app for considerably less than most quotes suggest.

Answer that honestly before you collect quotes, and the numbers you get back will finally be comparable to each other.