"How much will an app cost?" is the first question we get on most discovery calls. The honest answer starts with another question: what kind of app, for what kind of business, with what kind of expectation?
After nearly two decades of shipping mobile work, here's the cost picture we'd give an Australian business deciding whether the budget is realistic.
The ranges that hold up
Roughly speaking, you should plan around four bands. These are AUD, all-in including design, development, testing, and a sensible launch buffer.
- $30k–$80k. A focused MVP. Native iOS or Android, not both. One or two user roles, a backend with simple authentication, perhaps a payment integration. Enough to prove the idea with real users.
- $80k–$200k. A serious v1. Both iOS and Android (likely cross-platform), a back-office for staff to manage content or orders, real-time notifications, analytics, more than one user type. This is where most production apps live.
- $200k–$500k. A platform play. Multi-tenant or multi-region, deep integrations with other systems, content management, complex offline behaviour, sophisticated permission models. A real product, not just an app.
- $500k+. A bespoke platform or regulated build. Healthcare, finance, defence, or anything with hard compliance overlay. Penetration testing, audit logging, formal QA, and the documentation that goes with it.
What drives the number
Five things move the budget more than anything else:
- Number of user roles. Each new type of user (customer, manager, admin, supplier) is a new set of screens, permissions, and workflows.
- Integrations. Every external system you talk to (payment processor, CRM, accounting, mapping, identity, AI) is more work to integrate, more work to test, and more dependencies to maintain.
- Offline behaviour. Apps that work offline cost more than apps that don't. Sync logic, conflict resolution, queueing.
- Native iOS and Android. Cross-platform tools have closed the gap but doubled-platform native still costs 30–50% more than a single platform. Worth it sometimes; not always.
- Compliance overhead. APRA, TGA, ISO 27001, SOC 2 — each adds documentation, testing, and review that has nothing to do with the product but everything to do with shipping it.
The line items that catch people out
Even sophisticated buyers miss these.
- Annual platform fees. Apple Developer Program: AUD $149/year. Google Play: USD $25 one-off. Trivial individually, but you need them to ship.
- Push notifications. Free until you have 100k users, then they aren't.
- App store optimisation. Listing, screenshots, video, localisation. Real work, often forgotten.
- First-year hosting and analytics. Backend hosting, observability, error tracking, analytics tooling. Plan AUD $5–30k a year depending on scale.
- Ongoing maintenance. OS updates, dependency upgrades, security patches. Budget 15–25% of build cost per year. The apps that survive five years are the ones whose owners committed to this from day one.
What you should resist paying for
A few patterns we'd argue against:
- Features your users haven't asked for. Build a small thing, ship it, learn what users actually want, then build the next thing. The cheapest version of any feature is the one you didn't build because the users didn't need it.
- A custom backend when an off-the-shelf one would do. Auth, payments, content management, push, analytics — these are commodity. Reinvent any of them only if you have a specific reason.
- Native everything when web would suffice. A polished progressive web app might do everything you need at a fraction of the cost. Check before committing to native.
How we quote
For most engagements we run a paid discovery sprint (one to two weeks, fixed price) to scope the actual build properly. The output is a written estimate with the assumptions explicit, the risks called out, and the phases sequenced. We've found this avoids the two failure modes: huge build with vague requirements, or fixed-price quote that everyone regrets six weeks in.
If you'd like a frank conversation about what your idea is likely to cost, book a discovery call and we'll talk through it.
