What does it cost to build an app?
The honest starting point: an app that actually earns money costs about as much as a mid-range car. That is not a scare tactic, it is what a working business tool costs when it has to be reliable, secure and worth opening twice.
You have probably seen quotes an order of magnitude apart, which makes the whole market look arbitrary. It is not. This article breaks down what drives the number, how the platform decision moves it, and which costs arrive after launch when most budgets have already closed.
Why nobody quotes a fixed price up front
An app is a service, not a product on a shelf, and its price comes from two things: expert hours and the complexity of what you asked for. "Like Uber, but for X" can describe a EUR 10,000 project or a EUR 100,000 one, and no serious team will guess between those in an email.
That is what a discovery phase is for. A short, paid piece of work that turns the idea into a scope: who the user is, what the first version must do, what it must integrate with, and what success looks like in numbers. It is the cheapest insurance in the process, because the alternative is discovering the gap in month three. If the idea itself is not yet proven, do that first, and validating an app idea covers how.
One more piece of context if you are comparing quotes internationally. A quality team in Central Europe bills around EUR 50 to 75 an hour, against EUR 100 to 150 in Western Europe or the US. The work is the same work; the arbitrage is real, and it is one reason clients come to us from outside Hungary.
The four factors that set the price
1. Complexity
The most obvious driver, and the one that compounds. Each new feature has to work with everything already there, so cost grows faster than the feature list.
Focused MVP, from roughly EUR 5,000 to 10,000. A handful of core functions on one platform, built to test the market rather than serve it forever.
Mid-complexity product, roughly EUR 12,000 to 25,000. User accounts, notifications, a payment integration, an admin interface. A real business tool.
Complex system, EUR 35,000 and up. Real-time synchronization, custom algorithms, hardware or IoT communication, marketplace logic with several sides to it.
2. The technology underneath
Your stack decides how fast the product is, how secure it is, and what it costs to extend in year two. We build on modern JavaScript, Next.js and TanStack with a headless CMS, because it gives us performance and a small attack surface without giving up content editing. A cheap foundation is the most expensive decision available: everything built on it costs more forever, which is what technical debt actually means in an invoice.
3. Design depth
Design is not the part that makes it pretty. Interface work decides whether people understand the product and complete the action you built it for, which is why research-backed UX and UI design tends to show the clearest return of any line in the budget. A template interface saves money in the quote and loses it in conversion.
4. Integrations
Apps rarely live alone. Payment providers, a CRM, invoicing, inventory, shipping, analytics: each connection is precise work that has to survive the other system changing. Integrations are where optimistic estimates usually break, so list them explicitly before anyone quotes.
Web, native or cross-platform
This single decision moves the budget more than any feature.
A web app is the pragmatic default. One codebase across laptop, tablet and phone, no store approval, updates live the moment you ship them, and it is findable in search, which no native app is. A modern progressive web app can be installed to the home screen, work offline and send notifications, so the gap to native is narrower than most people assume.
Native means two applications, one for iOS and one for Android, which roughly doubles both the build and the maintenance. It earns its price when performance is the product: heavy graphics, background processing, deep hardware access.
Cross-platform sits between them. One codebase produces both mobile apps, cutting the cost against native by a third or more, with performance close enough that users do not notice. For most commerce and service apps this is the best value on the table when store presence is a requirement.
The costs that arrive after launch
Buying the car is one budget. Fuel, servicing and insurance are another.
Infrastructure. A modern app needs scalable hosting, from roughly EUR 40 a month for something small to several hundred for a busy system. That is what keeps it standing when a campaign works.
Store fees. Apple charges 99 USD a year, Google a one-off 25 USD. Then 15 to 30 percent commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions, which has to be in your pricing model from the start.
Maintenance. Budget 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost annually for bug fixes, OS updates and small improvements. Skipping it is how an app quietly stops working on the newest phones.
Getting found. App store optimization and paid acquisition, because an app nobody discovers is an expensive piece of code. Our outsourced marketing team usually picks this up at launch.
Security and compliance. Monitoring, updates and privacy obligations. One incident costs more than several years of doing it properly.
How to get a number you can trust
Bring three things to the first conversation: who the user is and what problem you are solving for them, the smallest version that would still be useful, and how the product is supposed to make money. With those, an estimate is engineering. Without them, it is fiction.
Then treat the estimate as a range with named assumptions rather than a single figure, and ask what would move it in each direction. Any team that cannot answer that has not thought about your project yet. If you would rather start from the cost side, what a website actually costs works through the same exercise for web projects.
If you want a realistic band for your idea, describe it to us and we will tell you which of the three brackets it lands in, and why.
Frequently asked questions
What is a realistic budget for a first app?
A focused MVP on one platform typically starts around EUR 5,000 to 10,000. Add user accounts, payments and an admin interface and you are in the EUR 12,000 to 25,000 range. Complex systems with real-time data or hardware integration go well beyond that.
Why will nobody quote a fixed price from a short brief?
Because the same one-sentence idea can mean a EUR 10,000 project or a EUR 100,000 one. A short discovery phase turns the idea into a scope, and it is far cheaper than discovering the gap halfway through the build.
Is a web app cheaper than a native mobile app?
Usually, yes. One codebase serves every device, there is no app store review, and updates go live immediately. Native costs the most because it means building and maintaining two separate applications.
What are the running costs after launch?
Hosting and infrastructure from roughly EUR 40 a month for a small app, store fees where relevant, monitoring and security work, plus 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year for maintenance.
How do the app stores affect the economics?
Apple charges 99 USD a year for a developer account, Google a one-off 25 USD. The bigger number is commission: 15 to 30 percent of in-app purchases and subscriptions, which belongs in your pricing model from day one.