How Much Does It Cost to Build an App? The Real Numbers for 2026
App costs range from $16 a month with no-code to $50,000+ with an agency. Here are the 5 cheapest ways to build an app, compared by real cost, skill and time.
How much does it cost to build an app? Anywhere from $16 a month with a no-code builder to $50,000+ with an agency, the price depends entirely on how you build it. This guide from Appy Pie AI compares the 5 cheapest ways to build an app, with the real cost, skills and time for each, plus a cost breakdown by app type, so you can pick the route that fits your budget.
What This Guide Delivers
- What an app actually costs, from $16/month to $50k+
- The 5 cheapest ways to build an app, compared
- A clear cost / skills / time table
- Cost by app type (ecommerce, marketplace, etc.)
- Quick tips to keep your costs low
- The cheapest route for most people
No-code builders are the cheapest and fastest route for most apps, from $16 per app per month. Rated 4.7/5 on G2 from 1,388 reviews.
Build Your App FreeApp cost at a glance
$16/mo
Cheapest: no-code
A real app, per month, no coding.
$5k–$50k
Priciest: an agency
Fully custom, built over months.
TL;DR Quick Summary
There is no single price for building an app, it depends on the method. The five cheapest ways, from least to most expensive, are: a no-code builder ($16 per app per month), converting an existing website to an app ($10 to $30/month), a pre-made template ($30 to $1,000), coding it yourself ($100 to $500+ if you have the skills), and hiring a developer or agency ($5,000 to $50,000+). For most people on a budget, a no-code builder is the fastest and cheapest path to a real, published app. To see that path run end to end, our walkthrough on how to build an app with AI takes one brief from the first prompt through to a store listing.
Build Your App Free With Appy Pie AI →Table of Contents
Jump to any section. This guide covers what an app costs overall, the 5 cheapest ways to build one (with cost, skills and time), a full comparison table, cost by app type, tips to save money, the real total cost of ownership, cost by complexity, stage and region, what an AI app costs to build and run, yearly maintenance, app store fees, and the cheapest route for most people.
- How Much Does It Cost to Build an App?
- The 5 Cheapest Ways to Build an App
- Cost Comparison Table
- How Much Does It Cost by App Type?
- Quick Tips to Keep Costs Low
- The Cheapest Way for Most People
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What You Actually Pay
- Cost by Complexity
- Cost to Build an AI App
- Cost by Development Stage
- Cost by Where Your Team Is
- Maintenance and Running Costs
- App Store Fees
- Is Building an App Worth It?
- Sources and Method
How Much Does It Cost to Build an App?
There is no single price tag. What you pay depends almost entirely on the method you choose, and the gap between the cheapest and most expensive routes is enormous. Here is how the five main ways to build an app stack up by cost.
What You Actually Pay: The Real Total Cost of a No-Code App
Most cost guides quote a platform’s headline monthly price and stop there. That number is never what lands on your card. Here is the honest arithmetic for our own platform, read from the Appy Pie AI pricing page on 22 September 2026, including the parts that are easy to miss.
| What you pay for | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Build and test | Free for 7 days | The free trial is for personal, non-commercial use. It is a trial, not a permanent free tier. |
| Basic plan | $16 /app/month | Publishes to Google Play. Android and PWA only. |
| Gold plan | $36 /app/month | Publishes to Google Play. |
| Platinum plan | $60 /app/month | Required for the Apple App Store. Publishes to both stores. |
| Google Play developer account | $25 one time | Paid to Google, not to us. Not included in any plan. |
| Apple Developer Program | $99 per year | Paid to Apple, not to us. Not included in any plan. |
| Extra app submissions | Charged per submission | Your first submission is supported free; later ones are billed. |
| Extra guidance sessions | $25/hour, minimum 10-hour package | Three interactive sessions are included on a paid plan. |
So what does year one really cost? An Android-only app on the Basic plan is $16 × 12 + $25 = $217 for the first year. The same app on both stores needs Platinum, so it is $60 × 12 + $25 + $99 = $844 for the first year, then $819 a year after that. Those are the numbers to compare against an agency quote, not the monthly price on its own.
Two things we will not pretend about
First, there is no free-forever plan that publishes to the app stores. You can build and test at no cost during the trial, and you can keep a project going, but a live listing on Google Play or the App Store needs a paid plan plus the store’s own fee. Any guide telling you a polished store-listed app costs nothing is selling you something. Our app publishing page walks through both stores step by step.
Second, iOS is the expensive half. Our Basic and Gold plans publish to Google Play. Getting onto the Apple App Store means Platinum at $60 per app per month plus Apple’s $99 a year. If your audience is Android-first, say in India, Brazil or Indonesia, you can cut your year one cost by about three quarters by shipping Android first and adding iOS when it pays for itself.
The 5 Cheapest Ways to Build an App
From least to most expensive, here are the five routes, with the real cost, skills and time each one takes.
1. No-Code App Builder
$16/moNo-code platforms let non-developers build apps with visual drag-and-drop editors, built-in hosting, and ready integrations (Google Sheets, Zapier, payments). They are the fastest and cheapest way to a real, published app. If your app needs custom logic that a visual editor cannot express, the next step up is low-code app development, where licences are priced per user or per app.
Pros
- Cheapest route to a published app
- No coding, launch in days
- Hosting and integrations built in
- Publishes to Android, iOS and PWA
Cons
- Less custom than hand-coding
- Monthly subscription on paid tiers
2. Convert a Website to an App
$10 – $30/moIf you already have a responsive website, a wrapper places it inside a native shell (WebView) with an icon, splash screen and push notifications, then you publish it to the stores. A cheap way to go mobile without rebuilding.
Pros
- Reuses your existing website
- Very low cost, very fast
- Adds push notifications and an app icon
Cons
- Not a fully native experience
- Limited to what your website does
3. Pre-Made App Template
$30 – $1,000A ready-made template (from CodeCanyon, Codester, GitHub or Appy Pie AI template library) gives you UI layouts and basic functionality to rebrand and customize, rather than starting from scratch.
Pros
- Cheaper than fully custom
- Faster head start than from zero
- Customizable branding and colors
Cons
- You or a freelancer must customize it
- Quality and support vary by template
4. Build It Yourself (Code)
$100 – $500+If you can code, building your own app gives full control and no subscription, just hosting and maintenance. Typical stacks: Flutter or React Native front-end, Firebase or Node back-end, hosted on Firebase, Heroku or AWS.
Pros
- Full control over design and features
- No platform subscription
- Cheapest long-term if you have the skills
Cons
- Requires strong development skills
- Slow to build and you maintain everything
5. Hire a Developer or Agency
$5,000 – $50,000+Hiring a freelancer or agency is the route for a fully custom product when you lack technical skills. Cost varies widely by location, complexity and agency reputation, and you still define requirements and test. Founders weighing that against the cheaper routes may want our guide to building an app on a startup budget, which sets the spend against your runway rather than the feature list.
Pros
- Fully custom build
- No technical skills needed from you
- Scales to complex, high-traffic apps
Cons
- By far the most expensive ($5,000+)
- Slow (months) plus ongoing maintenance costs
Cost Comparison Table
The same five routes side by side, including a couple of variations, so you can match a method to your budget at a glance.
| Method | Estimated cost | Skills | Time to launch | Ideal for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No-Code (Appy Pie AI) | Free – $16/mo | None | Days | Simple business/personal apps |
| Other No-Code Builders | Free – $60/mo | None | Days–Weeks | MVPs, prototypes, internal tools |
| Website to App | $10 – $30/mo | Low | Days | Sites needing a mobile presence |
| Template + Freelancer | $250 – $1,000 | Low–Medium | Days–Weeks | Semi-custom apps on a budget |
| Build from Scratch | $100 – $500+ | High | Weeks–Months | Developers with time |
| Hire Developer/Agency | $5,000+ | None | 1–3+ Months | Fully custom, high-scale projects |
Prices based on publicly available plans and typical market rates. Last verified: June 2026.
How Much Does It Cost to Build an App by App Type?
“How much does an app cost” has no single answer because an app is not one thing. A booking form and a marketplace with payouts to hundreds of sellers are different orders of engineering. The table below pairs what a no-code plan handles against what the same app costs as a custom build, using the Business of Apps complexity brackets.
| App type | No-code | Custom / agency | What drives the custom price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple business or personal app | $16 – $60 /app/month | $5,000 – $15,000 | Mostly design and content. Little custom logic, so this is where no-code saves the most. |
| Ecommerce / shopping app | $16 – $60 /app/month | $15,000 – $50,000 | Catalogue, cart, payment integration, order state, refunds. |
| Booking or appointments | $16 – $60 /app/month | $15,000 – $40,000 | Calendar logic, availability rules, reminders, no-show handling. |
| On-demand (food, taxi) | $36 – $60 /app/month | $30,000 – $80,000 | Live tracking, dispatch, two or three separate user apps, driver payouts. |
| Marketplace | $36 – $60 /app/month | $30,000 – $100,000+ | Multi-seller accounts, split payments, trust and safety, disputes. |
| Social or community app | $36 – $60 /app/month | $25,000 – $75,000 | Feeds, moderation, notifications, and cost that scales with users. |
| Healthcare or fintech | Not suitable | $40,000 – $150,000+ | Compliance, audit trails, penetration testing, and liability. Regulation is the cost. |
Where the no-code column stops being the right answer. We have put “not suitable” against healthcare and fintech deliberately. If you are handling protected health data or holding customer funds, your cost is driven by compliance and liability, not by screens, and you need a build you can audit and a team who will sign up to that. The same caution applies to anything safety-critical. Being cheap is not a reason to be in the wrong tool.
For the rest of the list, the pattern is consistent: the more of your app is standard plumbing, the more a builder saves you. A shopping app needs a catalogue, a cart and a checkout, and those are solved problems. What a builder cannot do is invent logic nobody has built before, which is exactly what the bottom two rows are paying for.
App Development Cost by Complexity
When you pay developers to build an app from scratch, price tracks complexity more than anything else. Business of Apps, whose cost research is the figure most other guides quote, last updated its benchmarks in June 2026 and puts custom development in three brackets.
| Complexity | Custom development | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| Simple | $5,000 – $50,000 | A basic interface and a set of basic features. Content, a form, a catalogue, simple accounts. |
| Medium | $50,000 – $120,000 | Real back end, user accounts, payments, integrations, push, an admin panel. |
| Complex | $120,000 – $300,000 | Live data, matching or routing logic, heavy compliance, multiple user types, scale. |
Read the bottom of that first bracket carefully. The cheapest credible custom build starts around $5,000, and that is for something a no-code builder handles on a $16 a month plan. The gap is not small and it is not a rounding difference. It is the single biggest cost decision you will make, and it comes before any feature discussion.
The honest exception. If your app is the product and its logic is the thing customers pay for, a visual builder will eventually constrain you. Ride hailing dispatch, real-time multiplayer, a regulated medical device, a trading engine: these belong in the $120,000 bracket and no amount of drag and drop changes that. Paying for custom work is the right call when the logic is genuinely yours.
How Much Does It Cost to Build an AI App?
An AI app has two bills, not one. There is the cost of building it, and there is the cost of the AI it calls every time someone uses it. Agency cost guides published this year put the build at roughly $25,000 to $300,000 or more. A no-code or AI builder turns the build into a monthly plan instead. Either way, an AI feature inside the app, such as a chat assistant or automatic summaries, is billed per use by the model vendor, and that second bill is the one most guides leave out.
What the build costs
| How you build it | Build cost | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Agency, simple AI chatbot | $25,000 – $60,000 | Iternal AI, Sep 2026 |
| Agency, AI MVP | $25,000 – $80,000 | Iternal AI, Sep 2026 |
| Agency, basic AI app | $10,000 – $50,000 | Softr, 29 May 2026 |
| Agency, AI app (full range) | $40,000 – $300,000+ | Appinventiv, 24 Aug 2026 |
| Agency, complex or enterprise AI | $300,000 – $500,000+ | Softr, 29 May 2026 |
| Vibe coding tool | Lovable Pro $25 a month, Base44 and Replit from $20 a month | Each vendor’s pricing page, read 28 Sep to 5 Oct 2026 |
| Appy Pie AI (describe the app, the AI builds it) | $16 per app a month for Google Play, $60 per app a month for both stores | Our pricing page |
The store fees from earlier still apply on every route: $25 once for Google Play and $99 a year for Apple. With Appy Pie AI, the AI builds your app from a description, and the plans above list no separate per-prompt charge for that.
What the AI costs to run each month
If your app has a live AI feature, you pay the model vendor for every reply it gives. We priced one example against each vendor’s own price sheet: 1,000 active users who each get 20 AI replies a month, with about 1,500 tokens going in and 400 coming out per reply. That is 30 million input and 8 million output tokens a month.
| Model | Price per 1M tokens, in / out | Monthly cost for the example |
|---|---|---|
| gpt-6-luna (OpenAI) | $0.10 / $0.50 | $7 a month |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google) | $0.30 / $2.50 | $29 a month |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic) | $1 / $5 | $70 a month |
| gpt-6.1-sol (OpenAI) | $2 / $10 | $140 a month |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Anthropic) | $2 / $10 | $140 a month |
| Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) | $4 / $20 | $280 a month |
Three things follow from that table. The model you pick moves the bill about 40 times for the same app. The bill grows with use: ten times the users is ten times the cost, so 10,000 users on Claude Haiku would be about $700 a month. And small models handle most in-app jobs, such as answering questions about your menu or summarising a form, so start small and move up only where answers fall short.
Where the AI money actually goes
The model is the smallest part of a custom AI build. Iternal AI puts the model at about 10% of the total effort. The rest is preparing your data, connecting the app to your other systems, testing answers and keeping them safe. That is why agency quotes for AI apps start where ordinary custom apps are already expensive, and why messy data pushes a quote to the top of its range.
Where the Money Goes: Cost by Development Stage
A quote arrives as one number, which makes it hard to argue with. Broken into stages it becomes negotiable. Business of Apps reports how real budgets divide up, and the shares are consistent enough to plan against.
| Stage | Share of total budget | Typical spend |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and scoping | 10% – 20% | From $5,000 – $10,000 at the low end, rising past $40,000 on large projects |
| Design | 15% – 25% | $5,000 – $10,000 simple, $10,000 – $25,000 typical, $50,000+ on complex products |
| Development | 40% – 50% | $30,000 – $70,000, $70,000 – $150,000, or $150,000 – $300,000 by bracket |
| QA and deployment | 10% – 15% | $5,000 – $15,000 simple, $15,000 – $30,000 mid, $30,000 – $50,000 complex |
Two practical consequences. Development is roughly half your budget, so every feature you cut before the build starts saves about twice what it appears to. And discovery plus design can reach 45% before a line of code exists, which is exactly the work a no-code builder front-loads for you with templates and a visual editor. That is where most of the saving actually comes from, not from cheaper programmers.
Cost by Where Your Team Is
The same app costs different money depending on who builds it and where they sit. Across fifteen countries, Business of Apps found a roughly tenfold spread in hourly rates.
| Where | Hourly rate | Developer salary per year |
|---|---|---|
| United States | Around $100/hour | $110,000 (was $120,000 in 2022) |
| United Kingdom | $150 – $400/hour (highest of 15) | $85,000 |
| France | Not reported | $70,000 |
| India and Vietnam | $20 – $40/hour (lowest of 15) | $12,000 (India) |
Within the United States the spread is narrower but still real. Business of Apps cites Indeed data putting Seattle at $131,000 and Princeton-Trenton at $124,000 a year, against Austin at $116,000 and Raleigh-Durham at $113,000. For iOS specifically, San Francisco reaches $151,000 while Philadelphia sits at $120,000.
Offshoring at $20 to $40 an hour is the obvious lever and it is a real one, but rate is not cost. A cheaper hourly rate with a nine-hour time difference, a language gap and no shared product context routinely produces more revision rounds. The saving is real when your specification is genuinely tight and you have someone technical to review the work. It evaporates when neither is true, which is most first-time projects.
The Costs Nobody Quotes You: Maintenance and Running an App
This is the part that wrecks budgets. A build quote covers getting to version one. It does not cover keeping the app alive, and an app you stop maintaining stops working, because the platforms underneath it keep moving. Business of Apps puts annual figures on the recurring work.
| Ongoing cost | Per year | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Security updates | $1,000 – $2,500 | Patching libraries and dependencies as vulnerabilities are disclosed. |
| Performance monitoring | $2,400 – $24,000 | Crash reporting, analytics and alerting tools, billed monthly or annually. |
| Third-party API maintenance | $3,000 – $20,000 | Payment, maps, auth and messaging providers change their APIs and deprecate versions. |
| Platform updates | $1,000 – $30,000 depending on scope | Each new iOS and Android release can break things and change store requirements. |
Add the middle of those ranges and a modest custom app costs something in the order of $10,000 to $20,000 a year to simply keep running, before you add a single feature. Over three years that can approach the original build cost. When you compare an agency quote against a subscription, this is the column people forget, and it is usually the one that decides the answer.
Why a subscription looks different once you include this. On a managed no-code platform the security patching, the monitoring, the hosting and the iOS and Android compatibility work happen on the platform’s side and are inside the monthly price. You still own your content, your data and your store listings, and you still pay Apple and Google their fees. What you stop paying for is an engineer to keep up with other people’s release notes. That is the actual trade: less control over the internals, in exchange for someone else carrying the maintenance. Our guide to custom business software prices the same choice over three years: buy, build without code, or develop.
App Store Fees: What Apple and Google Actually Take
Two separate things get called “store fees” and mixing them up is the most common costing mistake we see. One is a fee to have a developer account. The other is a commission on money your app makes.
What it costs to have an account
- Google Play Console registration: “There is a US$25 one-time registration fee.” Once, not annually.
- Apple Developer Program: a “$99 annual membership.” Every year, and your apps come off the store if you stop paying.
So reaching both stores costs $124 in year one and $99 a year after, on top of whatever you pay to build. No builder, agency or freelancer can waive these; they are paid to Apple and Google directly.
What they take from your revenue
Here the widely repeated “the stores take 30%” is out of date, and it matters if you are modelling a paid app or subscriptions.
| Store | Commission | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | 15% | Under the App Store Small Business Program: a “reduced commission rate of 15% on paid apps and Apple In-App Purchases” for developers under 1 million USD in proceeds. |
| Apple | 10% | Further reduced for EU alternative terms and for subscriptions after their first year. |
| Google Play | 15% | “15% for the first $1M (USD) revenue earned by the developer each year,” per the Google Play service fee schedule. |
| Google Play | 30% | “For earnings in excess of $1M (USD) revenue earned by the developer each year.” |
| Google Play | 15% | “For automatically renewing subscription products,” regardless of revenue. |
Google states plainly that “of those developers that are subject to a service fee, 99% are eligible for a fee of 15% or less.” If you are reading this to plan a first app, assume 15%, not 30%. And if your app is free with no in-app purchases, there is no commission at all, because there is no revenue for the store to take a share of.
Quick Tips to Keep Costs Low
Use a free trial
Almost every no-code platform offers a 7 to 14 day trial. Test a few before you commit to one.
Start with an MVP
Build only the core features that prove your idea, then add the rest once you have real user feedback.
Reuse existing assets
Import your logo, brand colors, fonts and copy instead of paying for new design work.
Choose scalable infrastructure
Pick a plan you can grow into so you are not forced into a costly migration later.
Is Building an App Worth It? Reading the Cost Against the Return
Cost only means something next to what the app is for. Two questions come up constantly and both deserve a straight answer rather than a number pulled from the air.
How much is an app with 100,000 users worth?
There is no honest single figure, and any guide that gives you one is guessing. What a user is worth depends entirely on how the app makes money, and the spread is enormous: an ad-supported utility might earn well under a dollar per user per year, while a subscription app charging $5 a month with even 2% of users converting is a completely different business. Downloads are not revenue, and installed users are not active users.
The useful version of the question is per-user economics. Work out what one engaged user pays you in a year, subtract what it costs to acquire and serve them, and only then multiply. If you want the mechanics of each model, our guide to how free apps make money walks through eleven of them with the store commissions applied.
Is owning an app profitable?
It can be, and the deciding factor is usually your cost base rather than your idea. An app that cost $80,000 to build and $15,000 a year to maintain has to clear roughly $125,000 over three years before it has returned anything. The same app built on a $60 a month plan has to clear about $2,500. The second one can be profitable on a niche audience that would never repay the first.
This is the real argument for starting cheap. Not that no-code is better engineering, but that a low cost base turns a modest, uncertain audience from a failure into a viable business, and buys you the evidence to justify spending more later.
The Cheapest Way to Build an App for Most People
When budget is your main concern, a no-code builder like Appy Pie AI is almost always the fastest, cheapest path to a working app, drag-and-drop editing, built-in integrations and predictable monthly pricing get you live in days, not months. If you already have a responsive website, converting it to an app is an even cheaper way to extend your reach. Coding it yourself is cheapest long-term only if you already have the skills and time, and hiring an agency makes sense only when you need a fully custom, high-scale product and have the budget for it.
Build Your App the Cheapest Way, No Code
Skip the $5,000 agency quote. Appy Pie AI no-code builder gets you a real, published Android and iOS app from a free start, in days.
Build Your App Free Compare the Best AI Web App BuildersSources and How We Costed This
Cost guides age badly, and most of the numbers circulating about app development trace back to nobody in particular. Every figure on this page has a named source and a date we checked it. Here is the full ledger.
Our own plan prices, what each tier publishes to, the store fees it discloses, submission and session charges, and the free-trial terms.
Custom development ranges by complexity, budget share by stage, hourly rates and salaries by country and US metro, and annual maintenance costs.
03Apple Developer Program and the App Store Small Business Program
The $99 annual membership, and the 15% and 10% commission terms including the 1 million USD threshold.
04Google Play Console registration and the Google Play service fee schedule
The $25 one-time registration fee, the 15% and 30% service fee tiers, and Google’s own statement that 99% of developers pay 15% or less.
05OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini API price sheets
The per-token prices behind the monthly AI running cost example. Google marks its newer Flash prices as fixed only until 31 December 2026, so we used Flash-Lite.
06Iternal AI, Softr and Appinventiv
The agency build ranges for AI apps, and Iternal’s estimate that the model is about 10% of the effort. These are vendor estimates, so we show each one with its name rather than averaging them.
How we handled the numbers
Ranges stay ranges. Where a source gave a spread we report the spread instead of inventing an average, because a single “average app cost” is the least useful number in this subject.
Aggregators are labelled. Business of Apps compiles its own sources, and where it names them we pass that through: Arc.dev, FullStack Blog and InApps for the US hourly figure, Indeed for salaries.
Unverified figures were dropped, not rounded. Anything we could not confirm this time was left out rather than repeated from another blog post. That includes one maintenance figure whose source page contains an evident typo, and the percentage-of-build-cost rules of thumb that circulate widely with nothing behind them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest way to build an app?
The cheapest way to build an app is a no-code app builder, at $16 per app per month and needs no coding. Converting an existing website into an app ($10 to $30 per month) is another very low-cost option.
How much does it cost to build an app?
It ranges from $16 per app per month with a no-code builder to $50,000 or more with a custom agency build. A simple app costs $16 to about $60 per month no-code, while custom development starts around $5,000 and rises with complexity.
How much does it cost to make an app by yourself?
If you can code, building it yourself costs roughly $100 to $500 in hosting and tools, with no subscription. If you cannot code, a no-code builder lets you make an app yourself from free to about $60 per month.
How much does it cost to build an app by type?
A simple app runs free to $60/month no-code (or $5,000 to $15,000 custom), an ecommerce app $16 to $60/month (or $15,000 to $50,000 custom), and a marketplace or on-demand app $30 to $80/month (or $30,000+ custom).
Can I build an app for free?
Yes. Most no-code builders have a free tier or trial, so you can build and test an app at no cost. You typically pay only when you publish to the app stores or need advanced features.
Is no-code really cheaper than hiring a developer?
Dramatically. A no-code builder costs around $16 per month, while hiring a freelancer or agency starts at $5,000 and often runs much higher, plus ongoing maintenance.
How much does it actually cost to build an app?
For a no-code app you pay a subscription plus the store fees: on our plans that is $16 per app per month for Android, or $60 for both stores, plus Google’s $25 one-time registration and Apple’s $99 a year. Year one lands near $217 Android-only or $844 for both stores. For custom development, Business of Apps puts a simple app at $5,000 to $50,000, a medium one at $50,000 to $120,000 and a complex one at $120,000 to $300,000, before maintenance.
Can I build my own app for free?
You can build and test one for free, and that is genuinely useful for proving an idea. Our free trial runs 7 days and is for personal, non-commercial use. What you cannot do for free is publish and keep a listing live: that needs a paid plan, plus Google Play’s $25 one-time fee or Apple’s $99 a year. Anyone promising a free app live on the App Store is leaving out the store’s own bill.
How much is an app with 100,000 users worth?
There is no credible single number, because value depends on how the app earns. An ad-supported utility may earn well under a dollar per user per year while a subscription app is a different business entirely. Work out what one engaged user pays you annually, subtract acquisition and running costs, then multiply. Downloads are not revenue and installs are not active users.
Is owning an app profitable?
It depends far more on your cost base than your idea. An app that cost $80,000 to build and $15,000 a year to run must clear roughly $125,000 over three years to break even. The same app on a $60 a month plan needs about $2,500. Starting cheap is what makes a small audience viable.
How much does it cost to maintain an app each year?
More than most quotes admit. Business of Apps puts security updates at $1,000 to $2,500 a year, performance monitoring at $2,400 to $24,000, third-party API maintenance at $3,000 to $20,000 and platform updates from $1,000 to $30,000 depending on scope. A modest custom app commonly costs $10,000 to $20,000 a year just to keep working. On a managed no-code plan most of that sits with the platform and is inside the monthly price.
Do app stores really take 30% of my revenue?
Usually no, and this is the most out-of-date figure in app costing. Apple’s Small Business Program charges 15% on paid apps and in-app purchases below 1 million USD in proceeds, and 10% in some EU and subscription cases. Google Play charges 15% on the first $1M a year and 15% on auto-renewing subscriptions regardless of revenue. Google states that 99% of developers subject to a service fee qualify for 15% or less. If your app is free with no purchases there is no commission at all.
How much does an AI app cost to run each month?
It depends on how many people use the AI feature and which model it calls. For an app with 1,000 active users who each get 20 AI replies a month, the model bill comes to about $7 a month on OpenAI’s gpt-6-luna, $29 on Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, $70 on Claude Haiku 4.5 and $140 to $280 on the larger OpenAI and Claude models, at the vendors’ published prices in October 2026. The cost grows in step with use, so ten times the users is ten times the bill. That is on top of the cost of building and hosting the app itself.
The Cheapest App Is the One You Actually Ship
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