How much does it cost to build an app in the UK?
Between £3,000 and £40,000 for most UK businesses, and the position in that range is decided almost entirely by three things: whether people log in, whether money changes hands, and whether it has to work without signal.
Below is the breakdown by app type, what each feature actually adds, the running costs nobody quotes for, and how to read two wildly different quotes for the same idea.
By Lucas Reddington, full-stack developer and AI engineer, Northbytes. Last updated .
What apps cost, by what they do
"An app" covers everything from a glorified web page to a piece of regulated software, which is why a single average is useless. These are the four bands most UK projects fall into, based on what the app has to do, not what industry it's in.
Simple content app
£3,000 - £6,000
A club, church or community app: content, a schedule, notifications, sign-in.
One kind of user, no payments, data mostly read, not written. This is the shape most first apps turn out to be once you strip out the features that were added to the wishlist because they sounded good.
App with accounts and a backend
£6,000 - £15,000
Bookings, memberships, customer records, an admin area you log into.
The jump in price is the backend: a database, an admin interface, permissions, and the fact that two people can now change the same thing at once. Most business apps land here.
Platform with payments
£15,000 - £40,000
Subscriptions, in-app purchases, marketplaces, anything handling money.
Money brings edge cases: failed payments, refunds, renewals, tax, disputes, and store rules about what you're allowed to charge for inside an app. It is more work than the feature list suggests.
Complex or regulated
£40,000+
Healthcare, finance, real-time multiplayer, heavy hardware or offline use.
Where correctness is expensive: audit trails, data residency, formal testing, accessibility standards, or genuinely hard engineering like sync and conflict resolution.
Those ranges reflect what UK studios and agencies publicly quote. Our own starting points sit below them deliberately: web apps from £1,500 and mobile apps from £3,000, because our developers use current AI tooling for the mechanical parts of the work and their own judgement for everything else. Every line is still reviewed and owned by an engineer, and every project is a fixed quote.
How we estimated these ranges
- The four bands are our read of publicly advertised UK agency and studio pricing plus the quotes we write ourselves, grouped by what the app has to do. They are a planning aid, not survey data, and they assume a UK-based team, English-language delivery and no regulated sector requirements.
- The 30-40% cross-platform saving is a rule of thumb from delivering the same feature set both ways: one codebase, one test pass, one release process instead of two. It narrows sharply on apps that lean on platform-specific hardware or background work.
- Maintenance at 15-25% of build cost a year is the industry convention we plan against, covering annual iOS and Android releases, dependency and security updates and small fixes. It excludes new features, hosting and store fees, which are quoted separately.
- App-store commission and developer fees are the only fixed numbers on this page. Those come from Apple's and Google's own published terms, listed under Sources, and are checked on the date shown there.
- Northbytes prices - £1,500 for a web app, £3,000 for a mobile app, £45 a month for hosting and maintenance - are our published rates, not market averages. Everywhere the two appear together, the ours-versus-the-market distinction is stated.
What actually moves the number
Features are not equally expensive, and the ones people assume are costly often aren't. In rough order of impact on a quote:
Accounts and sign-in
The first big step up. Passwords, resets, sign in with Apple (mandatory on iOS if you offer any other social login), sessions and account deletion, which both stores now require in-app.
Payments and subscriptions
Digital goods sold inside an app go through Apple's or Google's billing and carry their commission. Physical goods and services can use your own processor at card rates instead. Which one applies changes both build cost and revenue.
Offline working
Genuinely the most underestimated line. Storing data locally is easy; deciding what happens when two devices edited the same record on a train is not.
Notifications
Cheap to send, expensive to get right. Segmentation, timing, preferences and the server-side plumbing behind them are most of the work.
Native or cross-platform
One cross-platform codebase for both stores usually costs 30 to 40 percent less than two native builds. Native wins when the app leans on hardware or has to feel completely smooth.
Design
Using platform conventions is close to free. A distinctive designed interface with custom illustration and motion is real work, and is sometimes worth it.
Integrations
Every external system the app talks to - CRM, accounting, calendar, payment processor - is its own small project, priced individually.
Content and data migration
If there is existing data to move in and clean, that is work whoever does it, and it should be priced separately instead of assumed.
Native, cross-platform, or not an app at all
Building natively means two codebases, Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, each with its own build, its own bugs and its own maintenance. It buys you the best possible performance and immediate access to new platform features. For a small number of apps that matters enormously; for most it doesn't.
Cross-platform, meaning React Native or Flutter, is one codebase that ships to both stores. It typically costs 30 to 40 percent less than building twice and roughly halves ongoing maintenance, because a fix happens once. The ceiling is real but distant: heavy background processing, unusual hardware and day-one support for a brand new OS feature are where it gets awkward.
And then the option most people skip. A web app runs in the browser at your own address: nothing to install, found by Google, shared by link, updated the moment you ask, and no store commission on anything you sell. It starts at £1,500 with us rather than £3,000. If the reason for wanting an app is "we should have an app", that's the conversation worth having first.
The costs that don't stop at launch
Every one of these applies whoever builds your app. A quote that covers only the build is not a cheaper quote, it's an incomplete one.
Apple Developer Program
annual membership
Required to publish on the App Store, billed yearly by Apple. Pay it on your own account so the listing belongs to you rather than to your developer.
Google Play Console
one-off registration
A single registration fee for a Play developer account, again in your own name. Cheaper than Apple's and not recurring.
Hosting and backend
from £45 a month
Anything with accounts or data needs a server behind it. Ours is £45 a month, or £90 with a database, including monitoring, backups and patches.
Maintenance
15% - 25% of build, a year
The industry rule of thumb, and roughly right. iOS and Android both ship major versions annually; an app left alone for two years usually needs rebuilding, not updating.
One thing worth insisting on: the Apple and Google developer accounts should be in your business name, with your developer added as a collaborator. Apps published on an agency's account leave the client unable to ship an update or reclaim their reviews when the relationship ends, and untangling it afterwards is far harder than getting it right on day one.
If your app sells anything, read this bit
Digital goods and subscriptions sold inside an app go through Apple's or Google's billing, and both take a commission: 30 percent as standard, dropping to 15 percent for smaller developers through Apple's Small Business Program and on the first million dollars a year on Google Play. That is a business-model decision, not a technical one, and it belongs in the spreadsheet before the build starts.
Physical goods and real-world services are treated differently: those can use your own payment processor at ordinary card rates, which is why a takeaway app and a meditation subscription have very different economics for the same build cost.
Store rules on this change regularly and are worth checking against Apple's and Google's own documentation, linked in the sources at the bottom of this page, not against a blog post from two years ago.
Six questions to ask every quote
A ten-times spread between quotes usually means the developers imagined different apps, not that one of them is dishonest. These six questions collapse the difference fast.
- What exactly is in this price, feature by feature, and what is explicitly not?
- Is it fixed, or an estimate against a day rate? If it's a day rate, what happens when it runs over?
- Who owns the code, the designs and the store accounts on delivery, and is that written down?
- What does year two cost: hosting, maintenance, OS updates, and who pays when Apple changes something?
- Which platforms, natively or cross-platform, and why that choice for this app?
- What have you built that's live right now, and can I install it?
For the record, ours: The Forge and Light of the Word are both on the stores and both ours end to end. Install them and judge the work instead of the sales page.
Rough it out in thirty seconds
Answer four questions and see a range, plus which answers moved it. It is a planning aid built from our published prices, not a quote - the real number is fixed and agreed before anything starts.
Likely range for this shape of project
£3,000 – £4,800
Then £90 a month: hosting and maintenance for the backend it talks to.
What moved the number
Nothing yet - this is our published starting point. Our published starting point for iOS and Android.
Assumes a UK-based team, no regulated-sector requirements, and that you own the result. The spread is real: the same brief lands differently once we have seen the actual data and the actual systems. Anything genuinely unusual we would rather scope properly than guess at.
Get the fixed numberCommon questions
How much does it cost to build an app in the UK?
For a simple app with one kind of user and no payments, £3,000 to £6,000 is realistic. Add accounts and a backend and you are in the £6,000 to £15,000 range, which is where most business apps land. Anything handling subscriptions or in-app purchases starts around £15,000, and regulated or technically hard products go well beyond £40,000. Our own entry points are £1,500 for a web app and £3,000 for a mobile app, on a fixed quote agreed before we start.
Why do quotes for the same app vary by ten times?
Three reasons, and only one of them is quality. First, scope: two developers quoting from the same one-page brief have imagined different apps, and the cheap one has usually imagined the smaller one. Second, who does the work: an agency price includes account management, project management and offices; a small studio's does not. Third, day rates vary from about £250 to £1,200 across the UK market. Ask every quote to state the feature list and the assumptions, and the comparison stops being mysterious.
How much does it cost to maintain an app each year?
Budget 15 to 25 percent of the original build cost per year, plus hosting and the store fees. That covers keeping up with annual iOS and Android releases, security patches, dependency updates and small fixes. It is not optional: apps that go two years without maintenance usually need rebuilding rather than updating, and the rebuild costs more than the maintenance would have. Our hosting and maintenance is £45 a month, or £90 with a database, with fixes included.
Is a cross-platform app really cheaper?
Usually yes, by roughly 30 to 40 percent against building twice natively, because one codebase serves both stores. The trade-off is that anything deeply tied to a platform - complex background work, unusual hardware, brand new OS features on launch day - is harder or slower to reach. For most business apps, which are screens, data and accounts, cross-platform is the sensible default and native is the exception you should have a reason for.
Can I build an app for £500?
Not a custom one. At that budget you are looking at a template app builder with a monthly fee, which can be the right answer for a simple content app if you accept the template's limits and that you are renting rather than owning. The honest alternative is often a web app instead: no store fees, no review queue, shareable by link, and cheaper to build. If the budget is tight, we would rather tell you which smaller version fits it than quote for the full idea and let you discover the gap later.
Sources
Figures quoted from outside Northbytes come from these sources, checked on 26 July 2026. Our own prices are our published rates.
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