The Honest Cost of Building an App in 2026

Every week, someone asks us "how much does it cost to build an app?" Every week, the honest answer is the same: it depends, and the range is wider than you think. But "it depends" is useless, so here is something more useful: a transparent breakdown of what real projects actually cost in 2026, based on our own invoices and what we see in the market.

Before the numbers, some context. We are a two-person consultancy based in the US, charging fifty dollars per hour for development work. That is well below the US market rate (seventy-five to two hundred fifty per hour for comparable experience), because we optimize for volume and long-term retainer relationships rather than maximum hourly rate. An agency in a major metro area will charge two to five times our rates for equivalent work. An offshore team will charge one-third to one-half. The quality and communication overhead varies accordingly.

Tier 1: The Validation Build (five to fifteen thousand dollars). This is for founders who have an idea and need to test it with real users. Typical scope: single platform (web or mobile, not both), three to five core screens, basic authentication, one integration (payment, email, or a third-party API), simple data model with five to ten tables, deployed to production with CI/CD.

Real example: a client wanted to test a marketplace for freelance translators. We built a web app with Next.js, Supabase for auth and database, Stripe for payments, and a basic matching algorithm. Five screens: translator signup, client job posting, matching results, job detail, and payment flow. Time: four weeks at roughly thirty hours per week. Cost: six thousand dollars. Hosting: twelve dollars per month on Supabase free tier plus Cloudflare Pages.

What you get at this tier: a working product that real users can interact with. What you do not get: admin dashboards, analytics, email notifications, polished UI (we use component libraries, not custom design), or mobile apps. This tier is explicitly for validation, not for scaling.

Tier 2: The Launchable Product (twenty to sixty thousand dollars). This is for founders who have validated their idea and need a product that can handle real growth. Typical scope: responsive web application (works on mobile via browser), seven to fifteen screens, role-based authentication with multiple user types, three to five integrations, admin dashboard, transactional email system, basic analytics, structured data model with fifteen to thirty tables.

Real example: a healthcare compliance platform for small practices. Web application with role-based access (admin, compliance officer, staff), document management with automated expiration tracking, compliance checklist workflows, email notifications for upcoming deadlines, reporting dashboard, and integration with a document signing service. Time: twelve weeks at thirty-five hours per week. Cost: twenty-one thousand dollars. Hosting: roughly one hundred forty dollars per month (Railway for the backend, Supabase for database, Resend for email, Cloudflare for CDN).

Another example: a B2B SaaS tool for managing contractor certifications. Multi-tenant architecture, PDF document parsing with AI-based field extraction, contractor self-service portal, admin dashboard with bulk operations, Stripe subscription billing, and API for third-party integrations. Time: sixteen weeks at thirty-five hours per week. Cost: twenty-eight thousand dollars.

Tier 3: The Scaled Platform (sixty to two hundred thousand dollars). This is for businesses with proven demand and revenue, building a platform to support significant growth. Typical scope: web application plus mobile app (or progressive web app), twenty-plus screens, complex authentication with organization hierarchies, ten-plus integrations, real-time features (notifications, live updates), comprehensive admin tooling, background job processing, data pipeline for analytics, performance optimization for high traffic.

Real example: a field service management platform for a facilities company with two hundred employees. Web dashboard for dispatchers and managers, React Native mobile app for field technicians, real-time location tracking with geofencing, automated scheduling algorithm, integration with QuickBooks for invoicing, customer portal for service requests, offline-capable mobile experience for poor-connectivity job sites, comprehensive reporting suite. Time: twenty-eight weeks with a peak team of three developers. Cost: one hundred ten thousand dollars. Hosting: roughly eight hundred dollars per month.

Now for the costs people forget. Every project has hidden costs that founders consistently underestimate.

Design: if you want custom UI/UX design (not a component library), add twenty to forty percent to the development cost. A good designer charges seventy-five to one hundred fifty dollars per hour. A full design system for a Tier 2 product takes three to five weeks.

Third-party services: authentication (Clerk, Auth0) runs zero to hundreds per month. Email (Resend, SendGrid) runs zero to eighty per month. File storage (S3, Cloudflare R2) runs five to fifty per month. Search (Algolia, Typesense) runs zero to two hundred fifty per month. Monitoring (Sentry, Datadog) runs zero to one hundred per month. These add up. Budget one hundred to five hundred per month for a Tier 2 product.

Ongoing maintenance: software is not a one-time purchase. Dependencies need updating. Security patches need applying. Users find bugs. Integrations change their APIs. Budget ten to twenty percent of the initial build cost per year for maintenance. A sixty-thousand-dollar platform needs six to twelve thousand per year in maintenance, or roughly five hundred to one thousand per month.

App store costs: if you are building a mobile app for iOS and Android, Apple and Google each take a thirty percent cut of in-app purchases and charge ninety-nine to one hundred dollars per year for developer accounts. The Apple review process can delay launches by days to weeks. Budget extra time for app store compliance.

Legal and compliance: terms of service, privacy policy, GDPR compliance, HIPAA compliance (if healthcare), SOC 2 (if enterprise sales) -- these are real costs. A basic terms and privacy policy from a tech-savvy lawyer runs one to three thousand dollars. HIPAA compliance can add ten to thirty thousand to a project. SOC 2 certification costs twenty to fifty thousand.

Our biggest piece of advice to founders: do not build more than you need. The most expensive feature is the one nobody uses. Every feature you cut from v1 saves money on development, testing, maintenance, and complexity. Start with Tier 1, validate with real users, then invest in Tier 2 only after you have evidence of demand. We have seen too many founders spend sixty thousand on a Tier 2 product only to discover that their core assumption was wrong. A six-thousand-dollar validation build would have uncovered the same insight.

The honest truth is that building software is expensive, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either cutting corners you cannot see or subsidizing the cost with venture capital that expects a return. Know what you are paying for, budget for the hidden costs, and invest proportionally to your certainty.