How much does it cost to develop an app? For most of the business apps we build, the app development cost falls between £1,000 and £10,000, and a larger platform with its own back office starts from around £10,000. That is a lot lower than most UK price guides suggest, and there is a reason for it, which we explain below.
These are typical ranges, not quotes. Two apps that sound the same can be very different jobs once you know who uses them and what they have to connect to, so every app is priced properly after a short conversation about what it needs to do.
How much does it cost to develop an app in the UK?
Roughly, business apps fall into three bands.
- A simple app on top of something you already run: £1,000 to £3,000. A focused app that does one or two jobs well, using information your business already holds.
- A customer-facing app: £2,000 to £10,000. Something your customers download and sign in to, with their own account and the features that make it worth keeping on their phone.
- A full platform: £10,000 and up. The app and the system behind it: the screens your team uses to run it, several kinds of user, and connections to the other software your business depends on.
Where a project lands inside its band, or whether it moves up a band, depends on the things in the next sections.
Why our app development cost is lower than most UK guides
Many published UK guides quote £15,000 or more for a simple app and well over £100,000 for a complex one. Those figures assume everything is built from nothing: the app, the server it talks to, the logins, the admin screens and the database.
Most business apps do not need that, and it is why the mobile app development cost for a typical business comes out so much lower. Very often the information already lives in a system you run, or in a platform we have already built, so the app is a new way in rather than a new business system. One codebase also serves both iPhone and Android, so you are not paying for the same app twice. You pay for the part that is specific to you.
What pushes the cost of an app up
- The system behind it. This is usually the biggest single factor. An app that reads from something that already exists is a much smaller job than one that needs its own back office, reports and admin screens.
- Different kinds of user. One app can serve the public, signed-in customers and your own staff, each seeing different screens. Every extra audience adds design, testing and rules about who can see what.
- Payments and accounts. Taking money, issuing refunds and keeping customer accounts secure all add work, and they are the parts that must not go wrong.
- Connections to other software. Accounts packages, stock systems, couriers and CRMs each have their own rules and limits.
- Using the phone itself. The camera, scanning tags, measuring, location and working without a signal all take more building and much more testing than a screen of information.
- Notifications. Sending the right message to the right person at the right time needs rules behind it, not just a button.
What an app costs to keep running
The build is not the whole cost, and it is worth planning for the rest from the start.
- App store fees. Apple charges an annual fee to publish on the App Store, and Google charges a one-off fee for Google Play.
- Hosting. The server or system the app talks to has to run around the clock, and it grows with the number of people using it.
- Keeping up with Apple and Google. Both release new phone software every year and regularly change the tools apps are built with. An app nobody updates gradually stops building, and can eventually be removed from the stores.
- Knowing when it breaks. Most customers never report a crash; they just stop using the app. Crash reporting tells you first. We explain how in how do you know your app is crashing on customers.
Do you need an app at all?
Sometimes the cheaper answer is not an app. If people use it at a desk, use it occasionally, or you need it on any device without asking anyone to download anything, a web application does the same job for less and skips the app store review altogether. Our web application development page covers that route.
An app earns its place when people use it often, on the move, or need something only a phone does well: the camera, scanning, notifications, or carrying on without a signal.
How to get an accurate price for your app
The quickest way to a real figure is a short call. It helps to know three things before it: who will use the app, what it must do on day one rather than eventually, and which of your existing systems it needs to talk to. From that we can tell you which band you are in, what would push it up, and whether an app is the right answer in the first place.
See how we approach mobile app development, or book a meeting and we will give you an honest view of what your app would take.