How much does an app cost?Find out in a minute.

What does it cost to build an app in the UK?

There is no single price, and anyone who gives you a number without asking anything is guessing. There are ranges, though, and they are what the calculator above works from. At our rates a small marketing site starts around £1,000, a normal first version of a product with accounts and payments usually lands between £6,000 and £8,000, and a larger platform with several integrations and regulated data runs from about £20,000 up. All excluding VAT. Seven answers above, and you get our range for your own project rather than an average of everyone else’s.

What moves the price

Seven things, and they are the seven the calculator asks about. Two of them move the number more than the rest: regulated or sensitive data, because it changes how everything has to be built and tested, and the number of systems it has to talk to, because every integration is a place something can break that we do not own. There is more on why two quotes for the same brief can differ by a factor of three in why app quotes vary.

• What it is. A website, a web app, an internal tool, a mobile app — or all of it as one product.
• Who uses it. Your customers, your own team, or other businesses with accounts of their own.
• Payments. Subscriptions cost more to build than one-off payments, because plans, changes and failed charges are all screens and states.
• Accounts and data. What gets stored, and how carefully it has to be handled.
• Integrations. Accounting, a CRM, suppliers, payment providers.
• Number of screens. The closest thing to a measure of scope before anything has been drawn.
• Design. Finished designs are faster to build from. Nothing yet is not a problem — it is simply one more stage.

How we price it

A fixed price per stage, not an open hourly meter. You get a price for scope and design, one for the build, one for data, payments and integrations, and one for launch and handover — and you can cut a stage or defer it once you can see what it costs. There is a release you can click through every week, so you never have to take our word for how far along it is. The code and the documentation are in your name from launch; that is covered in who owns the code. We work for a price, not for a share of your business. What the first stage actually buys is set out in what a discovery phase costs.

How long it takes

The timeline comes from the same answers and arrives with the estimate. A small site is typically three to five working weeks, a first version with accounts and payments four to six, and a large platform around three months. Those are working weeks of our time, not calendar quarters; how long it takes to build an MVP goes into what actually sets the pace.

After launch

A product that is live does not stay live by itself. Most of what goes wrong in the first year is not a bug in the code but something around it: an operating system updates, a provider changes an API, a rule gets stricter. So the estimate carries a line for what it costs to have someone owning it afterwards — in practice a fractional CTO, a part-time technical lead, rather than a full-time hire you do not yet need a whole one of. Thirty days’ notice, and you can stop whenever you like. There is more in what a fractional CTO costs and in what app maintenance costs.

What happens once you have answered

The estimate is emailed to you straight away, and the same estimate reaches us. A person reads it — not a sales sequence — and follows up within a working day to put a short call in the diary. That is where the final price and the written offer come from, once we have been through what is really in scope, what can wait and what the first stage should be.

Common questions