What will it actually cost to build?
Pick the platform, complexity, design quality, and feature count. We compute a fair range against public vendor rate cards, so you walk into vendor calls with numbers, not guesses.
Platform
Complexity
Design quality
Scope + rate
Typical vendor quotes will land between $162,880 and $244,320, about ±20% around the midpoint.
Total hours
Low end
$
High end
$
How it works
One formula, anchored to real vendor rate cards
We start from a baseline of dev hours for your platform: 600 for a single native iOS/Android build, 400 for web, 1,100 for cross platform iOS + Android. Those numbers come from aggregated estimates in Clutch, NewGenApps, and GoodFirms rate cards.
Complexity multiplies the baseline (1× simple, 1.5× medium, 2.5× complex). Design quality nudges it again (1× → 1.6×). Each feature beyond the baseline adds ~40 hours. The range shown is ±20% around that midpoint, matching the real spread between competing vendor quotes.
Methodology
The arithmetic
Formula
Cost = (BaseHours × Complexity × Design + Features × 40) × Rate
- BaseHours
- 400 (web) · 600 (single mobile) · 1,100 (iOS + Android).
- Complexity
- 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.5.
- Design
- 1.0 / 1.3 / 1.6.
- Features
- Each extra feature adds ~40 hours.
- Rate
- Your blended hourly rate. Eastern Europe ~$50, US senior ~$150.
Budgeting tips
How to spend without getting fleeced
- 1
Get itemized quotes from three vendors before signing. Published rates vary 5× for the same scope, so outlier bids reveal scope misunderstandings faster than spec reviews.
- 2
A $5K design sprint catches scope mistakes that cost $50K to fix in code. Prototype before you build.
- 3
Don't pay for features your customers haven't asked for yet. Ship a tight MVP and let usage data drive the roadmap.
- 4
Budget 20 to 30% of the build cost for the first year of maintenance: bug fixes, OS updates, server costs, third party renewals.
- 5
Hourly rate is a poor proxy for total cost. A senior at $150/hr can ship a feature in a third of the time a junior at $50/hr takes.
Run the math once. Run the form forever.
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