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How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Mobile App? What Actually Drives the Number

What actually drives the cost of a mobile app: platform count, backend scope, monetisation. No price list — the levers to settle before you ask for a quote.

Updated

A phone lying face down on a dark desk beside folded technical drawings, a steel ruler and a scalpel, with a single green marker on the drawings

Every agency page that answers this question with a single number is guessing, and so is every "app cost calculator" that asks you four questions and prints a figure. Not because the number is secret — because the same sentence, "I want an app like Uber," describes projects that differ by an order of magnitude in the work required.

So this page does not give you a price. It gives you the things that decide the price. Settle these six and any competent studio can quote you accurately in a day. Leave them open and every quote you receive is fiction, including a cheap one.

The six levers

Lever Why it moves the number
Platform count One iOS app is one build, one review queue, one bug surface. Adding Android roughly doubles the testing matrix even with a shared codebase.
Backend surface Accounts, payments, push, file storage, moderation, an admin panel — each is a system with its own failure modes, not a screen.
Monetisation on day one A subscription app needs paywall logic, store receipt validation, restore flows and renewal handling before it can take a single lira or dollar.
Where the design comes from An existing design system is a starting line. "Make it look good" is a discovery phase.
Content and moderation User-generated content means reporting, blocking and a review queue — App Store review asks for these, and they are not optional.
What happens after launch Crash monitoring, store updates, OS version bumps. An app is not a delivery, it is a thing that keeps running.

The questions worth answering before you ask anyone for a quote

  1. Who is the first user, specifically? Not a segment — one person you can name and describe.
  2. What is the one thing the app must do on day one? Everything else is version two.
  3. iOS only, or both stores? If you cannot say why you need both, you probably need one.
  4. How does money arrive? Subscription, one-off purchase, free with something behind it, or nothing yet.
  5. Does anything already exist? A design file, a landing page, an audience, a backend.
  6. What is your deadline, and what makes it real? An investor meeting is a deadline. "Soon" is not.

If you can answer these six, you are ready to compare quotes properly — with us or with anyone else. If you cannot answer them yet, that is the actual first piece of work, and it is worth doing before you spend money on code.

Why a number on a page would be worse than useless

A published price is only honest if the scope behind it is fixed. To publish one, an agency has to pick a scope narrow enough to defend — and then every project that does not fit that scope gets quietly reshaped to fit the price. That is how you end up with an app that shipped on budget and does the wrong thing.

We would rather look at what you are building and tell you what it takes.

What "shipped" means here

Anyone can show you a portfolio. What is worth checking is whether the apps are actually on the store, and what the public record says about them. These are ours, with links so you can verify every figure yourself:

  • Glamour — Color Analysis & Glow Up — 4.2 from 6,066 ratings on the Turkish App Store, 4.4 from 72 ratings on the US store. App Store
  • HairMaxx — AI Hair Style & Care — 4.3 from 3,408 ratings (TR), 4.6 from 48 ratings (US). App Store
  • Tattoo Genie — AI Designer — 4.3 from 1,537 ratings (TR), 4.1 from 29 ratings (US). App Store

Two honest notes on those numbers. Rating counts are per storefront, which is why the Turkish and US figures differ so much — these apps found their first audience in Turkey. And figures were read from the public App Store record on 30 July 2026; they move.

You will notice there are no revenue numbers on this page. Revenue claims from an agency are self-reported and unverifiable by definition, so they do not belong next to figures you can check for yourself.

What we do instead of quoting a price

We look at your six answers, tell you what the first shippable version actually contains, and give you a scope and a timeline — the same 3-5 week window we work in on our own products. If the honest answer is that you need less than you think, we say that too.

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