App development cost calculator
Most app cost calculators are lead forms with a number at the end, and nobody can tell you how that number was produced. This one publishes the arithmetic: every choice maps to a fixed number of person-days, the total is multiplied by a day rate, and the ±20% band is stated rather than hidden. The coefficient table sits below the calculator, so you can reproduce the estimate yourself — including someone else’s.
- Effort in person-days, price as a range, and a timeline in weeks — not a single figure pretending to a precision that does not exist.
- The full coefficient table is on the page. Every number in the result can be traced back to it.
- No form before the result. The estimate appears immediately; we do not need your details to produce it.
- Calibrated against our own shipped projects rather than an industry survey.
Your configuration
How the calculation works
Everything is computed in person-days and converted to money only at the end. That is why a rate change touches one number here instead of the whole table.
- 1
Client effort = (baseline + scope + design + sign-in) × platform factor - 2
Server effort = backend + selected features + additional languages - 3
Total effort = (client + server) × maturity factor - 4
Price = total effort × day rate, presented as a ±20% range
The platform factor deliberately applies to the client portion only — shipping two native apps does not duplicate the backend.
The coefficients
| Item | Person-days |
|---|---|
| Baseline (setup, CI, release) | 12 |
| Scope: Up to 5 screens | 10 |
| Scope: 6–12 screens | 24 |
| Scope: 13–25 screens | 45 |
| Scope: More than 25 screens | 75 |
| Design: Standard components, lightly themed | 5 |
| Design: Custom design system | 18 |
| Design: Custom design with motion and edge states | 32 |
| Sign-in: No sign-in | 0 |
| Sign-in: Email and password | 6 |
| Sign-in: Social login (Apple, Google) | 10 |
| Sign-in: Enterprise SSO (SAML, OIDC) | 20 |
| Backend: Managed platform (Firebase, Supabase) | 8 |
| Backend: Own API with a database | 30 |
| Backend: Multi-tenant, roles, complex logic | 70 |
Features
| Item | Person-days |
|---|---|
| Payments (card, SEPA, wallet) | 15 |
| Subscriptions / in-app purchases | 12 |
| Chat or real-time messaging | 20 |
| Maps and location | 10 |
| Push notifications | 6 |
| Offline mode with sync | 18 |
| Photo or video upload | 10 |
| Admin panel / back office | 25 |
| Third-party integrations (ERP, CRM) | 12 |
| AI features | 20 |
| Additional languages (+1) | 4 |
| Platform: iOS only | × 1 |
| Platform: Android only | × 1 |
| Platform: iOS + Android (one codebase) | × 1.15 |
| Platform: iOS + Android (two native apps) | × 1.75 |
| Maturity: MVP — test an assumption | × 0.85 |
| Maturity: Production-ready — real operation | × 1 |
| Maturity: Platform-grade — audit, scale, SLA | × 1.25 |
| Day rate and band — €600 | ± 20% |
The three price bands
Almost every app lands in one of three brackets. What separates them is rarely screen count — it is what has to happen behind the screens.
| Bracket | Cost and timeline | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| MVP | €21,000 – €32,0004–7 weeks | One platform first, tightly bounded scope, no integrations beyond analytics and crash reporting. Enough to test an assumption in the market — not enough to build a year of work on. |
| Production-ready | €62,000 – €94,00013–20 weeks | Authentication, one or two integrations, a real design system, CI/CD from day one. Most of the consumer apps we ship live here. |
| Platform-grade | €232,000 – €347,00018–26 weeks | The app is the product: multi-tenant data, offline-first, complex permissions, native modules, large content libraries. |
What actually drives the price
Four line items explain most of the distance between a €40K quote and a €160K one for what looks like the same app.
The backend, not the interface
Twelve screens on a managed platform is a different project from the same twelve screens on a multi-tenant API with a role model. The screens look identical; the effort differs by roughly a factor of three.
Integrations with systems you do not own
Payment providers, ERP, shipping carriers: the sandbox never behaves like production. The cost is not in the connection but in the error handling, and in the fact that these systems change without asking you.
Maturity, not feature count
The same screens built to survive an audit cost more than the same screens built to test an idea. The difference is observability, test coverage, permissions, and what happens when a third party goes down.
What you give up by starting at the bottom
An MVP is cheaper because it omits things that are expensive to retrofit: an admin panel, a permission model, localisation, clean data migration. That is a legitimate trade — as long as it is made deliberately and not buried in a proposal.
Where this calculator stops being useful
A calculator that claims to cover everything is a sales instrument. These cases it does not model:
- Hardware integration: BLE devices, medical equipment, industrial controllers. Effort here depends on the quality of the manufacturer’s documentation, which cannot be estimated in advance.
- Regulated environments: MDR, ISO 13485, financial supervision. Evidence and documentation can exceed the development effort itself.
- Migrating an existing app with live data and active users. Data quality decides the outcome, and you only learn it by looking.
- Running costs after launch. As a rule of thumb, 15–20% of build cost annually for maintenance, store updates and operations — not included in the figure above.
Read next
Frequently asked questions
- In three brackets: an MVP runs roughly €25K–€60K, a production-ready app €60K–€150K, and a platform-grade product upwards of €150K. The bracket is set by backend scope and integration count, not by how many screens the app has.