The honest answer is: it depends on scope. But you can still plan with real numbers.
The rough tiers
- Simple app — a handful of screens, a contact or booking form, no user accounts: low four figures.
- Standard business app — user accounts, a backend, an admin panel, push notifications: mid four figures.
- Product-grade app — payments or subscriptions, real-time features, offline mode, several integrations: five figures and up.
Our project cost calculator has a dedicated mobile-app estimate that walks through exactly these choices.
The three real cost drivers
- Do you need a custom backend and admin dashboard? An app that just displays fixed content is cheap. An app where content changes, users log in, or data is stored needs a server — and that server needs an admin area so you can manage it without a developer. This is usually the single biggest line item.
- How many distinct screens and flows? Not "pages" — flows. Onboarding, search, a detail view, checkout, a profile, settings. Each flow is design plus build plus testing.
- Integrations. Payment gateways, maps, SMS, delivery APIs, an existing ERP. Each one is its own mini-project with its own edge cases.
Design complexity matters too, but less than people expect. A clean, standard design is not what makes an app expensive.
Why cross-platform keeps costs down
For most business apps we recommend Flutter. It builds for iOS and Android from one codebase, so you are not paying twice for the same feature, and the two platforms never drift out of sync. We go fully native (Swift or Kotlin) only when a platform-specific experience is central to the product.
One tip that saves the most money
Launch with a focused first version. Pick the one core flow, build it well, get it into the store. It is cheaper, faster to market, and you learn what users actually want before spending on the long tail of features. Almost every successful app we have shipped started smaller than the founder originally imagined.
What Codrex does
We quote each app individually after a short call, but the calculator gives you an instant range so you can budget first. We handle the App Store and Google Play accounts, the listings, and the review process — and the accounts stay registered to you.