How Much Does a Mobile App Really Cost in 2026?

Five agencies, one brief, quotes from €12,000 to €90,000. None of them is lying. Here is what actually moves the number.

Ask five agencies to quote the same app and the numbers will spread by a factor of five. That spread is not dishonesty - it is five different readings of an underspecified brief. An app is not priced by what it does on the happy path; it is priced by every state it must survive: no network, expired session, interrupted payment, a phone from 2019. Here are the ranges we consider honest in 2026, and the levers that move a project from one to the next.

The honest ranges

1. A focused utility - one core flow, no user accounts, no backend of its own: €8,000 to €25,000. Think calculator, configurator, content companion.
2. An MVP with accounts, a backend and one or two integrations - the typical startup or internal tool first version: €25,000 to €80,000.
3. A full product - payments, offline mode, notifications, admin panel, analytics, several third-party systems: €80,000 to €250,000 and up.
4. Rates explain the rest of the spread: Western European and US agencies bill €80-150 per hour, Eastern Europe €40-70, Southeast Asia €20-50 - for teams that can be equally senior. Where the team sits changes the number more than what the app does.

What actually drives the number

• Screens are cheap; states are expensive. Every screen exists in loading, empty, error and offline versions, and the quote that ignores them is the one that doubles later.
• One platform or two: cross-platform frameworks like React Native or Flutter deliver both stores from one codebase for roughly 30-40% less than two native apps - the right default for most businesses, covered in our comparison of progressive web apps and native apps.
• Integrations are the wild card. Each external system - payment provider, CRM, ERP, calendar - adds real days, and legacy systems add real weeks.
• Accounts, roles and permissions quietly add a third: authentication, password reset, profile management and access levels are invisible in a demo and mandatory in production.

The bills that arrive after launch

The build is not the whole price. Apple charges $99 a year and Google $25 once for store access; both push OS updates that occasionally break things; and a living app needs monitoring, dependency updates and small fixes. Budget 15-20% of the build cost per year for maintenance - a figure we publish in every proposal, and part of what we scope in a mobile app engagement. An app budgeted without its second year is an app priced at 80% of reality - the same rule we detail for what a web application really costs.

• ×5 the spread between honest quotes for the same vague brief
• 30-40% saved by one cross-platform codebase versus two native apps
• 15-20% of build cost per year is the realistic maintenance budget

An app is not priced by what it does. It is priced by every state it must survive.

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