Guide

Do you need an app for your business?

Only if it does something a website cannot: reliable push notifications, working with no signal, real use of phone hardware, or people opening it several times a week. If none of those apply, you want a better website, and it costs a fraction as much.

A good share of the people who ask us for an app want a website that feels better on a phone. The rest need software. Both are fine answers, and they cost very different amounts of money.

This is how to work out which one you are before you spend anything, written by people who make more from the expensive answer and will still talk you out of it.

By Lucas Reddington, full-stack developer and AI engineer, Northbytes. Last updated 26 July 2026.

The word "app" is doing too much work

Three different things get called an app, and confusing them is how budgets go wrong.

A mobile app is installed from the App Store or Google Play. It lives on the home screen, uses the phone's hardware properly, and every change you make has to pass through Apple or Google before your customers see it.

A web app is software that runs in a browser at your own web address. Nothing to install, you share it with a link, and a fix you make this afternoon is live this afternoon. Your accounting software, your booking system and your online banking are almost certainly web apps.

A website that works well on a phone is neither. It's a website. If what you want is your existing site to stop being awkward on a small screen, that's a much smaller job, and you should ask for that instead.

Most conversations that start with "we need an app" end with a web app or a better website. We compare the two in detail here.

The question that settles it: how often?

How many times will one person use this in a year? That single number decides more than any feature list.

Once or twice a year, and you want a website. Nobody installs software for a restaurant they visit at Christmas or a plasterer they'll call again in 2029. The install is more effort than the task.

Every week, signed in, with their own data waiting for them, and you're looking at software. A gym where members book four classes a week, a wholesaler whose trade customers reorder every Monday, a team of engineers filling in job sheets daily: those earn a place on someone's home screen.

Between those two extremes, build the web version first. It costs less, it changes faster, and it tells you whether the usage is really there before you commit to two app stores.

Reasons that hold up

If one of these describes you, an app is a sensible thing to spend money on.

People come back and log in

The moment your customers have an account with their own data in it, you're running software rather than publishing a brochure. Bookings, order history, saved preferences, progress, documents: all of that needs something a website page can't do on its own.

You need the phone itself

Camera, GPS, Bluetooth, working with no signal, notifications that arrive reliably. A roofer photographing jobs on a site with one bar of 4G needs an app. A menu doesn't.

The software is what you're selling

If people pay you for the thing itself rather than for a service the thing supports, you're building a product. That changes everything about how it should be planned, priced and looked after.

You're replacing paper or a spreadsheet

Job sheets, stock counts, engineer sign-offs, rotas, a shared file called final_v4_ACTUAL.xlsx. Internal tools are where most of the money quietly is, and they rarely need to be in an app store at all.

Reasons that don't

We've been asked to build all four of these. We've talked people out of most of them, and the ones we didn't talk out of it usually regretted the maintenance.

A competitor has one

Their download numbers are almost certainly worse than you'd guess. An app on a shelf that nobody opens is a maintenance bill with a logo on it.

To put "download our app" on a leaflet

A visitor needs one click. An installer needs a search, a download, an account, permission prompts, and a reason to keep the thing on a full phone. That's a much steeper hill than most plans allow for.

Because your website is painful on a phone

Then fix the website. It's cheaper, it's faster, and everybody sees the improvement instead of only the people who installed something.

Because it sounds like the next step

It might be. But an app is a commitment to keeping software alive, not a milestone you tick off. If nobody in the business is going to own it after launch, don't start.

An app is a product, not a project

This is the part that gets skipped in the excitement. Apple and Google each ship a major operating system release every year and retire things on the way. Store rules change. Signing certificates expire. A phone released next autumn will do something your app didn't expect.

A bug on a website takes ten minutes to fix and everyone has the fix immediately. The same bug in a mobile app takes ten minutes to fix, a day or two to get through review, and then reaches only the people whose phones actually install the update. Plan for the life of the thing, not the launch of it.

Our hosting and maintenance is £45 a month, or £90 if there's a database behind it, and that covers monitoring, backups, dependency updates, security patches and bug fixes so a small repair never turns into a separate invoice. Whoever builds yours, ask what year two costs before you sign for year one.

What we'd do with your idea

We build web apps from £1,500, iOS and Android apps from £3,000, and bespoke business systems from £5,000, all on a fixed quote agreed before we start. If the full idea is bigger than the budget, we'll show you which version fits now and which parts are worth adding once it's earning.

Two things about us that matter more than the price. The first is that you own what you pay for: source code, assets and data are yours on delivery, with no per-seat licence and no subscription keeping your own software alive. The second is that we've built this sort of thing under real scrutiny. PolicyMind is a compliance platform we built for a client that's live with paying users, around forty screens, brief to launch in four weeks. We designed and demonstrated a cohort management platform for Medway Council's advice and guidance service, complete with the security and governance documentation that came with it.

And we'll say the unprofitable thing when it's true. Most first builds should be a web app, and quite a few shouldn't be an app at all.

How our app builds work Work we've shipped

Common questions

How much does it cost to build an app?

With us, web apps and SaaS products start from £1,500, iOS and Android apps from £3,000, and bespoke business systems from £5,000. What moves the number is user accounts, payments, offline support, how many different kinds of user there are, and anything the app has to connect to. You get a fixed quote in plain English before we write any code.

Can one app cover both iPhone and Android?

For most business apps, yes. One codebase built with something like React Native covers both stores, which is roughly half the cost of writing two separate native apps. Two native codebases are worth it when you're doing heavy graphics, deep hardware work, or something where a few milliseconds matter. For a booking app or an internal tool, they aren't.

How long does it take?

A focused first version is usually four to eight weeks, plus a few days for App Store and Play Store review once it's ready. Larger platforms take longer, and we'd normally propose building the part that solves your worst problem first rather than everything at once, so it starts earning before it's finished.

Do I still need a website if I have an app?

Yes. Google indexes web pages, not the inside of your app, so a website is still how people find and check you out. Nobody installs software from a company they can't look up first. The website usually does the convincing and the app does the work.

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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