Why nobody will tell you what a mobile app costs
The honest answer is that most of the price is decided by four questions, and an agency that quotes before asking them is guessing. Here are the four, and what each one does to the number.
Four questions decide most of the price
Ask three studios what an app costs and you will get three ranges an order of magnitude apart, because they are quietly answering different questions. Almost the entire spread comes down to four decisions.
- Do users have accounts? Auth, password reset, sessions and roles are a week nobody remembers to quote.
- Does money move through it? Payments bring compliance, refunds, failed states and a support burden long after launch.
- Does someone on your side need an admin panel? That is a second application, and it is usually costed as a checkbox.
- Does it need its own backend, or will a managed one do? This is the single largest fork in the estimate.
What the number actually buys
A cheap quote is rarely a lie; it is usually a narrower scope. It typically excludes store submission and review handling, crash reporting, the second round of design revisions, and the four weeks after launch when real users find what testing did not.
Ask any quote to state what is not included. A studio that has thought about the project can answer immediately, and the answer tells you more about them than the price does.
The most expensive apps we have seen were not the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones rebuilt at month eight because the first version was scoped by price rather than by what had to work.
How to price-check anyone, including us
We do not publish a price list, and that is a decision rather than a hiding place. The four questions above move the number by more than any list could usefully express, and a published figure that does not survive the first conversation is worse than no figure at all. What we do commit to is that the scope and the price arrive together, in writing, within a day of you describing the project.
Take any quote you receive and check three things: is the scope written down, is the price fixed against that scope, and does the timeline come with it. If all three are present, you can compare offers honestly. If any is missing, you are not comparing prices, you are comparing optimism.