What 7 shipped products taught us about app development cost

Every quote you have ever been given for an app was somebody guessing, so here is the measured version: we shipped five iOS apps between June and July 2026, first commit to live on the App Store, in 6 to 14 days each. Those numbers come out of git history and the App Store lookup. If you want to understand app development cost, time is the only input you can actually verify, and few studios publish theirs.

We keep the receipts. Seven products are live right now, five on iOS and two on the web. Everything below is pulled from the repositories that built them.

The five iOS builds, measured

All five are Flutter. The clock starts at the first commit in the repository and stops when the app is live on the store.

• TendTail — 1 June to 15 June 2026. 14 days.
• GastroLog — 10 June to 16 June 2026. 6 days.
• Cortisol Calmer — 14 June to 24 June 2026. 10 days.
• Amaya — 18 June to 25 June 2026. 7 days.
• Chess Clock — 3 July to 10 July 2026. 7 days.

Look at the spread. GastroLog took 6 days and TendTail took 14, and both are single-purpose tracking apps built by the same studio, in the same framework, in the same month. One took more than twice as long as the other, and that gap is most of what you need to know about app development cost.

What actually drives app development cost

Four things move the app development cost, and they are rarely the four things people ask about in the first meeting.

Scope, measured in screens that hold state

A screen that displays something is nearly free. A screen that captures something, validates it, stores it, syncs it and shows it back to you later is the unit of real work. Count those and you have a rough shape of the app development cost before anyone opens an editor, which is where our own estimates start.

TendTail took 14 days because it carries scheduled local notifications, and notification behaviour changes between Android API levels in ways you find out about at build time. GastroLog took 6 because its capture flow is one screen and one list. Same effort per screen, different screen counts.

Integrations that sit outside your control

Every third-party service is a dependency with its own failure modes and its own release schedule. Payments, push notifications, health data, AI model APIs, analytics: each one adds integration work, then adds permanent maintenance work.

This is where mobile app development cost quietly doubles on projects that looked simple in the brief. A feature that reads “connects to their existing system” is never a day of work. Ask what the system is, whether it has a documented API, and who at the client can answer questions about it.

Review cycles and platform rules

Apple reviews every submission, and a rejection costs you a round trip regardless of how small the fix is. Health-adjacent apps get more scrutiny about claims. Subscription apps get scrutiny about how the paywall is worded.

You can plan for this by being conservative in the store listing copy from the first submission. Budget the calendar time as part of the app development cost, because it is real, and it lands after the build is finished.

The long tail of maintenance

The build is the cheap part. An app that is alive gets OS updates, framework upgrades, store policy changes and bug reports for as long as it exists. Any app development cost estimate that stops at launch day has described maybe half of the money.

Web work has a different cost shape

Two of our products are web, and their app development cost behaves differently from the mobile builds.

Layerpaint started in April 2026 and had its first paying customers within 12 weeks. That is a shorter path to revenue than the mobile apps managed, because the web has no review queue between you and your users.

MyScrapbook Studio has been in continuous build since August 2025. It carries 4,253 code updates and 82 services, and it is a multi-tier platform rather than a single app. It exists as a reminder that “an app” can mean a 6-day build or a year of continuous work, and the words in the brief are identical either way.

The technology is beside the point here. One product has a finished shape and the other has a growing one, and that alone separates a fixed app development cost from an ongoing one. Work out which you are commissioning before you compare any two quotes.

The only prices we can publish

Two line items in any app development cost have a public number attached, and both are platform fees rather than development work.

The Apple Developer Program costs USD $99 per year, and you need it to have anything on the App Store at all. It renews annually for as long as your app is listed.

Google charges a one-time registration fee for a Google Play developer account, paid once rather than yearly. Check the current amount at that link before you budget it, since Google adjusts it.

Everything else in an app development cost breakdown depends on what you are building. A studio publishing a fixed number for “an app” has priced an app it already imagined, which will be a different app from yours.

Why we publish time instead of a rate card

A day rate tells you what an hour of somebody’s attention is worth. It leaves out how many hours the thing takes, which is the half of the app development cost you actually need.

We track build duration from git on every project because it is the one number that resists being massaged after the fact. The commits are timestamped, the store listing has a release date, and the gap between them is the gap. When we estimate a new project, we do it by finding the closest match in that list and adjusting for the differences we can name.

That is also why the estimate arrives with reasoning attached. If we say a build looks like GastroLog rather than TendTail, you can see both apps, use both apps and push back on the comparison.

How to read any app development cost quote

Worth asking anyone who quotes you, including us.

Which of your shipped products is this most like, and how long did it take? A studio that measures its own work can answer immediately. One that stalls on it is estimating from feel.

What is in scope after launch? Get the maintenance arrangement written down before you sign, because that is where most of the lifetime app development cost sits. Twelve months of a live app will usually outweigh the build.

What happens when the estimate is wrong? Every estimate is wrong. What matters is whether you find out in week one or week nine, and that depends on whether the studio ships something you can open early.

The short version of our approach to app development cost: tight scope ships in days, and integrations are where the hours quietly go. Everything else is a conversation about what you actually need built.

Working out the app development cost of your project

Send us the shape of the thing. How many screens hold state, what it has to talk to, whether there is a subscription in it, and whether it needs to exist on both stores or just one.

We will point at whichever of the seven products above is closest, tell you what is different, and give you a number for your project specifically. That number goes in an email rather than on this page, because a page price is a price for an imaginary app.

You can read what we argue about in Received Wisdom, see what the studio does on the homepage, and check what we do with your data in the privacy policy before you send anything.