Get an instant, credible ballpark for building your app — pick your platform, complexity, and features, and see a cost range plus a realistic timeline.
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There is no single figure, because cost is driven by feature count and complexity rather than by platform or screen count.
The honest answer is a range, and the range is wide because a booking form and a marketplace with payments are both “apps”. The Parix.ai app cost calculator narrows it using the things that actually move the number.
Feature count. The single largest factor. Every feature is design, build, test and maintenance.
Backend complexity. An app that reads data is far cheaper than one where users create and share it.
Integrations. Payments, maps, messaging, third-party APIs — each adds build and test work.
Design. A component library moves fast; a bespoke design system does not.
Platforms. See below — this matters less than people expect.
Compliance. Health, finance and children’s apps carry real additional engineering.
Building both natively is not double the cost, but it is not the same cost either.
Design, backend, and product decisions are done once. Only the front-end work doubles, which typically puts two native apps at roughly 1.5 to 1.8 times a single platform, not 2.
Cross-platform frameworks reduce that further and are the right answer for most business apps. Native still wins where you need heavy device features, high-performance graphics, or the smoothest possible interface.
The app after launch.
Apps are not finished when they ship. Operating systems update twice a year and can break things. Devices change. Libraries get deprecated. App stores change their requirements.
Budget an ongoing annual figure as a percentage of the build cost for maintenance alone, before any new features. An app with no maintenance budget stops working within about two years — not because anyone broke it, but because everything around it moved. The App Maintenance Cost Calculator prices that side.
Cut features, not quality. Ship five things that work over twelve that half work. The App MVP Feature Prioritizer is built for exactly that call.
Use cross-platform unless you have a specific reason not to.
Buy the plumbing. Auth, payments and notifications are solved problems.
Validate before building. The cheapest app is the one you did not build because the demand was not there.
Founders sizing a build before approaching developers. Product managers sanity-checking a quote. Agencies giving a client a range without a full scoping session. If the product is a SaaS rather than a mobile app, the MVP Cost Estimator is the closer fit. Our mobile app team quotes against a defined feature list rather than an idea.
Pick your features above. A defined feature list produces a number you can act on; “an app” does not.
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