Comparing quotes
Why do app development quotes vary so much?
You asked three suppliers for the same thing and got £22,000, £65,000 and £140,000. Everyone tells you this is normal. Nobody tells you how to read it. It is readable, and it only takes two numbers.
Every quote is a day rate times a day count
That is the whole thing. A quote is someone estimating how many days of work your project is, and multiplying by what they charge for a day. Both numbers vary enormously, and the final figure hides which one is doing the work.
| Who | Typical day rate | 80 days | 140 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offshore team | £200–300 | £16,000–24,000 | £28,000–42,000 |
| UK freelancer, senior | £450–650 | £36,000–52,000 | £63,000–91,000 |
| UK small studio | £600–850 | £48,000–68,000 | £84,000–119,000 |
| London agency | £900–1,400 | £72,000–112,000 | £126,000–196,000 |
Six months to 6 October 2026, from 257 quoted day rates across 441 advertised contract positions. 25th percentile £434, 75th £575. Source: ITJobsWatch. That is one developer billing their own time; an agency rate covers a team, an office and a salesperson, which is why the bands above run higher.
Work it backwards
Take each quote and divide it by a plausible day rate for that supplier. A £22,000 quote at £250 a day is 88 days. The same £22,000 from a London agency at £1,000 would be 22 days, which for a real app is not an estimate, it is a deposit. Now you know what each supplier actually thinks your project is.
Then ask all three for the two numbers directly: what do you charge per day, and how many days is this. Any supplier who will not separate them is concealing one of them. The good ones answer immediately, because they built the quote that way.
The four things missing from the cheap quote
A low quote is often honest about the work it describes and silent about the work it does not. These four are the usual omissions, and together they are frequently 30 to 50 per cent of a project:
- Design. Not a logo. Screen-by-screen interface design, the states nobody thinks about — empty, loading, error, offline — and someone deciding what happens when a user does the thing you did not plan for.
- Testing. On real devices, not the simulator. If a quote has no QA line, QA is you, after launch, reported by your users.
- Store review. First submissions get rejected routinely, and each cycle is days of waiting plus the fix. A quote that assumes first-time approval has budgeted for the best case.
- The first year after launch. Covered separately on the maintenance page, and it is not optional: both platforms force work on an annual cadence whether you change the app or not.
Why the estimates differ even at the same rate
Two suppliers at the same day rate can still be fifty days apart, and usually one of three things explains it.
They scoped different products. Your brief said “users can message each other”. One supplier priced a text chat. The other priced attachments, push notifications, read receipts, moderation and a block function. Both read the same sentence.
One of them is optimistic. Estimates are produced by people who want the work. The optimistic quote is not usually dishonest; it is the same project with every uncertainty resolved favourably. You discover the difference as change requests.
One has done it before. Genuine domain experience cuts day counts, and a supplier who has shipped the thing you want three times is allowed to be faster. Ask which it is.
The question that sorts them
Ask each supplier: what are the three things most likely to make this take longer than you have estimated? A supplier who has thought about your project answers in specifics within seconds. A supplier who has not says there should not be any surprises, which is the single most expensive sentence in this industry.
The honest way to get quotes that match
They cannot match while the brief is a paragraph. The fix is to pay one supplier a small amount to produce a written scope first — screens, states, integrations, what is explicitly out — and then put that in front of all three. Quotes against a real specification land within twenty per cent of each other, and the difference that remains is the rate, which is a decision you can actually make.
That is what a discovery phase is for, and what it should cost is on its own page.
Sources. ITJobsWatch, UK contract software developer, six months to 6 October 2026: median £525/day, 441 adverts, 257 quoted rates, percentiles £370 / £434 / £575 / £611. Retrieved 7 October 2026. The four supplier bands in the first table are my own figures from quoting against these competitors, not a published survey — treat them as orientation. The 30–50 per cent omission range is likewise my own estimate from reviewing other people’s quotes.
Want a second opinion on a quote you are holding?
Send me the quotes and the brief. You get a read on what each one has priced, what is missing from the cheap one, and which is actually the better deal — usually the same day.
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