Free Tool
How Much Does an App Cost?
Get an instant, credible ballpark for building your app — pick your platform, complexity, and features, and see a cost range plus a realistic timeline.
- Cost range and timeline
- Runs in your browser
- Feature-by-feature
Platform
App complexity
Features
Design level
Extras
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There is no single figure
Cost is driven by feature count and complexity, not by platform or screen count — which is why the honest answer is a range, and why the range is wide. A booking form and a marketplace with payments are both “an app”.
This narrows it using the things that actually move the number, so you get a figure you can take to a developer instead of a guess.
Six things that move the number
Every one of them is design, build, test and maintenance work. The first is the single largest factor, the fifth matters less than people expect, and screen count is not on the list at all.
- Feature count is the largest factor by a distance. Backend complexity is next: an app that reads data is far cheaper than one where users create and share it.
- Integrations — payments, maps, messaging, third-party APIs — each add build and test work. Design depends entirely on whether you use a component library or a bespoke system.
- Compliance is the one that surprises people: health, finance and children’s apps carry real additional engineering.
iOS and Android: the honest answer
Building both natively is not double the cost, but it is not the same cost either — and the reason is worth understanding before you cut a platform to save money.
- Design, backend and product decisions are done once. Only the front-end work doubles.
- That typically puts two native apps at roughly 1.5 to 1.8 times a single platform, not 2.
- Cross-platform frameworks reduce it further and are the right answer for most business apps. Native still wins for heavy device features, high-performance graphics, or the smoothest possible interface.
The cost nobody budgets for
Apps are not finished when they ship. Operating systems update twice a year and can break things, devices change, libraries get deprecated, and app stores change their requirements.
- An app with no maintenance budget stops working within about two years — not because anyone broke it, but because everything around it moved.
- Budget an ongoing annual figure as a percentage of the build cost for maintenance alone, before any new features.
- The App Maintenance Cost Calculator puts that at 18–25% of build cost per year, which is the figure to budget against.
- 1LaunchEverything works. Nothing is owed yet.
- 2Months 6–12First OS update. Something breaks.
- 3Year 2Deprecated libraries, new devices, new store rules.
How to spend less without building less well
Four moves, and the first one is the only one that reliably works — because it reduces scope rather than quality.
- 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, and 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.
Four numbers worth keeping
Why Parix.ai gives this away
We quote app builds for a living, and the hardest part of the conversation is always the same: a client with a number in mind and no feature list. Narrowing that before anyone pays for a scoping session is free, and it makes the project better.
Price my appWho uses it
Founders sizing a build before approaching developers, product managers sanity-checking a quote, and agencies giving a client a range without a full scoping session.
If it is a SaaS, not an app
The SaaS MVP Cost Estimator is the closer fit, and our mobile app development team can tell you which of the two your idea actually is.
Take the range, not the midpoint
A range is the honest output of a feature list. Treating its lower end as the budget is how projects run out of money in month four — plan against the top of it.