How Much Does It Cost to Build an App in 2026?

Most answers to "how much does it cost to build an app?" stop at "it depends." It does, but you can still put numbers on it.

Below are five typical apps, priced with the same model that runs our app cost estimator, with the inputs shown so you can see where each number comes from. They're five of the example scopes on the estimator page, and we ran them on October 27, 2026.

How the numbers are built

The model prices a build the way a small senior team works today: managed services where they fit (Clerk for sign-in, Stripe for payments, Supabase for the database) and AI-assisted development. It adds up:

• Features. Each one has a range of engineering days for one senior engineer on one platform. Sign-up and login take 1 to 2 days with Clerk. Payments and subscriptions with Stripe take 2 to 4. An admin panel takes 3 to 7. A two-sided marketplace with payouts takes 7 to 15.
• A second platform. Web and mobile share the backend and most of the logic, so building both multiplies the feature work by 1.4 instead of doubling it.
• Groundwork. Project setup, environments and deployments take 1 to 3 days. Testing, hardening and launch, including app store review for mobile, take 2 to 5 days on one platform or 3 to 7 on both.
• Discovery, design and review. Discovery takes 2 to 5 days. Design gets a 3 to 7 day head start, then runs alongside the build at about a quarter of the engineering time. Architecture and code review add another 10%.
• Compliance, when you need it: 4 to 8 days for HIPAA, 5 to 10 for SOC 2 readiness, 2 to 4 for GDPR.

Every hour is priced at $100 to $150, our own rate range. The low end of each budget is the low estimate at $100 an hour, and the high end is the high estimate at $150. That's why the ranges are wide: they cover both how long the work might take and the rate. Discovery is where they narrow.

What's not included: hosting, app store fees, third-party services and formal compliance audits. Those are under ongoing costs below.

Five typical apps

All five include product design.

1. MVP web app

Inputs: web only; sign-up and accounts, payments and subscriptions, email and in-app notifications, an admin panel; design included.

That's 11 to 25 days of engineering, or 159 to 366 hours once discovery, design and review are counted: $15,000 to $55,000 over 3 to 8 weeks, with one senior engineer, a lead reviewing architecture and code, and a part-time designer. With designs you already have, it drops to $11,000 to $39,000.

2. Community app for iOS and Android

Inputs: mobile only; accounts, real-time chat, email and push notifications, search and filters, photo and video uploads; design included.

Built once in React Native with Expo for both stores, it's 12 to 29 days of engineering: $17,000 to $62,000 over 3 to 9 weeks, including app store review. Adding a web app on the same backend raises it to $21,000 to $79,000. Leaving chat out of the first version brings it down to $13,000 to $49,000.

3. AI assistant over your docs

Inputs: web only; accounts, an admin panel, document uploads and an AI assistant that answers from your own data; design included.

12 to 30 days of engineering: $17,000 to $63,000 over 3 to 9 weeks. The AI assistant alone is 4 to 10 of those days. If enterprise customers will ask for SOC 2, readiness work takes it to $22,000 to $80,000.

4. Marketplace

Inputs: web only; accounts, a two-sided marketplace with payouts through Stripe Connect, real-time chat, notifications, search, uploads and an admin panel; design included.

22 to 51 days of engineering, so the model puts two engineers on it: $27,000 to $98,000 over 3 to 9 weeks. Payouts (7 to 15 days) and chat (3 to 8) are the biggest pieces. Building it for web and mobile at once raises it to $36,000 to $129,000 and 4 to 11 weeks, and at that size the estimator suggests moving payouts and chat to a second phase to launch sooner.

5. Health app with HIPAA

Inputs: web and mobile; accounts, bookings, secure messages, notifications and file sharing for patients and clinicians, with HIPAA; design included.

22 to 56 days of engineering with two engineers: $27,000 to $105,000 over 3 to 9 weeks. Without the HIPAA work it would be $23,000 to $92,000, so compliance adds about $4,000 to $13,000 here. That's engineering only. What the HIPAA work involves, and what Supabase and Google Cloud require, is in Supabase HIPAA Compliance.

What drives the cost

• The features, more than anything. Login is a day or two. Payouts, bookings (3 to 10 days) and offline sync (5 to 12) can each take a week or more. The number of screens says little; what happens behind them sets the price.
• Platforms. One platform is the cheapest place to start. In our model a second one adds 40% to the feature work, because the backend is shared.
• Design. Custom design added $4,000 to $16,000 to the MVP above. Working from designs you already have, or an existing design system, costs less.
• Integrations and data work. A few third-party APIs (2 to 5 days), background jobs and data pipelines (2 to 6) and a public API for your customers (4 to 8) are easy to underestimate.
• Compliance. It reaches into every feature that touches sensitive data.
• How fast decisions get made. The model doesn't price this, but a team waiting a week for feedback is a team being paid to wait.

MVP or full build?

An MVP is the smallest version that tests your riskiest assumption with real users: usually one platform, the core workflow, and sign-in and payments if you charge. The MVP web app above lands at $15,000 to $55,000.

A full build adds what a growing product needs: teams and permissions (2 to 4 days), analytics dashboards (3 to 8), integrations, more admin tooling and often a second platform. The web-and-mobile marketplace, at $36,000 to $129,000, is closer to that end.

Our advice is to launch the MVP, watch what people use, and let that choose the second phase. The estimator does a version of this: when a plan runs past 10 weeks with more than three features, it names the two biggest and suggests moving them to a later phase.

What AI features add

In our model, an AI assistant or chat over your own data takes 4 to 10 days, AI document processing 5 to 12, and an AI voice agent 3 to 7. Adding an assistant to the MVP web app takes it from $15,000 to $55,000 up to $20,000 to $72,000, and from 3 to 8 weeks to 4 to 10.

The range is wide because the work is mostly about quality, not plumbing. Calling a model takes an afternoon. Making answers trustworthy takes retrieval tuning, test sets and checks before an answer goes out. For Emblem we built retrieval over more than 10 million pages with page-level citations, and it scored perfectly on Vectara's RAG benchmark. The work was in getting the right page back and checking answers against it. Model usage is billed separately by the AI provider and isn't in these numbers. More on how we approach it on our AI development page.

What compliance adds

HIPAA adds 4 to 8 days of engineering in our model, SOC 2 readiness 5 to 10 and GDPR 2 to 4. That covers access controls, audit logs and encryption. Formal audits and legal review aren't included and run on their own schedule.

Compliance also changes your hosting and vendor bills. Supabase, for example, needs the Team plan (from $599 a month) plus a paid HIPAA add-on before it will sign a BAA, and every vendor that handles health data needs a BAA of its own. Our HIPAA and SOC 2 engineering page covers how we do the work.

Ongoing costs after launch

The build is a one-time cost. These keep coming:

• Hosting and managed services. For an MVP these often start small. Supabase's Pro plan, for example, starts at $25 a month. Sign-in, email, push notifications and payment processing are usually priced by usage.
• App store accounts. The Apple Developer Program is $99 a year in the US. A Google Play developer account is a one-time $25 fee.
• Store requirements. The stores keep raising the bar. From August 31, 2026, Google Play requires new apps and app updates to target Android 16 (API level 36), with extensions to November 1 on request, and existing apps must target at least Android 15 to stay available to new users. A mobile app nobody touches for a year needs catch-up work before its next release.
• AI usage, if you have AI features.
• Maintenance. Dependency and security updates, monitoring and small fixes as real users find edge cases. Budget some engineering time every month instead of waiting for something to break.

How to cut scope

• Start with one platform unless both are core to the idea. It's the single biggest lever in the model.
• Use managed services for sign-in, payments, email and the database. The 1 to 2 days for sign-up and login assume Clerk; building that yourself takes much longer.
• Move the biggest feature to phase two. Taking chat out of the web marketplace brings it from $27,000 to $98,000 down to $24,000 to $84,000.
• Reuse designs if the product doesn't need a custom look.
• Don't cut security or compliance. If you handle health data, the HIPAA work isn't optional. Shrink where PHI goes instead, and the compliance work shrinks with it.
• Decide quickly. A short discovery phase, 2 to 5 days in our model, settles most of the questions that would otherwise stall the build.

Get a number for your app

The five apps above are examples. Your feature list is the one that matters, so run it through the estimator: pick platforms and features, and you'll get a timeline, a team and a budget range. If you'd rather talk it through, book a call below. We build web apps and mobile apps with a small senior team, and we'll tell you when a cheaper path makes more sense.

If no one on your team can make these calls, our fractional CTO guide explains when part-time technical leadership makes sense.