"How much for an app?" is the question I get most often, and it has the same answer as "how much for a building?" — it depends entirely on what goes inside.
But that answer is useless when you are trying to budget. So here are real numbers, what moves them, and the costs that tend to appear after the invoice you were expecting.
The Honest Ranges for 2026
Working with an experienced individual developer in India, building cross-platform with React Native so one codebase serves both iOS and Android:
- ₹3–5 lakh — a focused app. Login, one core workflow, push notifications, both store submissions. Think a booking app, a simple marketplace browser, an internal tool. 8–10 weeks.
- ₹6–12 lakh — multiple user types, payments, chat or real-time features, offline support, a proper admin backend. 12–18 weeks.
- ₹12–25 lakh — complex products: live tracking, video, heavy third-party integrations, or strict compliance requirements. 5–7 months.
- Under ₹1.5 lakh — you are buying a template with your branding applied. Sometimes exactly right. Rarely what people think they are getting.
Agencies typically sit 1.5–2.5× above these. Sometimes justified by capacity and continuity; often it is overhead you are funding.
Native vs Cross-Platform, in Money Terms
This is the single biggest cost decision, and it gets over-thought.
Building natively means two codebases — Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. Two builds, two sets of bugs, two sets of changes forever. It roughly doubles both the initial cost and every subsequent update.
React Native gives you one codebase for both. It is what a large number of apps you use daily are built with, and for anything that is primarily screens, forms, lists and data, users cannot tell the difference.
Native genuinely earns its cost when you need deep hardware access, sustained high-performance graphics, or platform-specific capabilities at the edge of what the OS offers. For most products — and almost every MVP — that is not the situation.
The practical rule: start cross-platform. If you later find one specific feature that demands native, you can write that piece natively and keep the rest shared.
Where the Money Actually Goes
A rough allocation for a typical build:
- Core features — 40%. What the app does. The only part most people picture.
- Backend and API — 20%. Apps are rarely standalone. Something has to store data, handle auth and send notifications. Frequently forgotten when comparing quotes.
- Design and UI — 15%. Mobile design is not shrunken web design. Gestures, states, transitions, two platforms' conventions.
- Testing across devices — 10%. Android fragmentation is real. What works on a flagship can break on a three-year-old mid-range phone that a large share of your users actually own.
- Store submission and launch — 5%. Listings, screenshots, privacy declarations, review responses.
- Admin panel — 10%. How you manage users and content without messaging a developer.
Note that only 40% is the app itself. The backend line is where quotes most often diverge — some include it, some assume you have one.
The Costs Nobody Quotes You
These arrive after launch and surprise people:
- Apple Developer Program — $99/year, forever. Stop paying and your app leaves the store.
- Google Play — $25, one time. Mercifully simple.
- Server and database hosting — ₹2,000–15,000/month depending on usage. Grows with success.
- Push notification service — free at low volume, chargeable at scale.
- Maintenance — 15–20% of build cost per year. The one people most underestimate.
That last one deserves emphasis. iOS and Android ship major updates annually, and each can break something. Dependencies get security patches. Apple and Google change store requirements and enforce them retroactively. An app left untouched for eighteen months is usually broken, and sometimes removed.
What Actually Drives Your Price Up
- Real-time anything. Live chat, live tracking, collaborative editing. All meaningfully harder than they look.
- Offline support. "It should work without internet" is a sync-conflict problem, not a caching problem, and it can add weeks.
- Payments inside the app. Apple and Google take 15–30% on digital goods and enforce it strictly. This affects your business model, not just your build.
- Third-party integrations. Each one is someone else's API, someone else's documentation, and someone else's outages.
- Scope drift. Same as every software project. The most reliable cause of overruns anywhere.
How to Reduce Cost Without Regret
- Launch on one platform first. Even cross-platform, submitting to one store first cuts testing and review effort. Pick where your users actually are.
- Use a component library rather than fully custom design. Saves a large share of the design budget and looks entirely professional.
- Cut features, not foundations. Ship three things that work rather than eight that half-work.
- Write the spec before asking for quotes. Costs you a weekend, saves you a fortune in rebuilt features.
- Respond quickly during the build. Founder responsiveness measurably shortens projects, and time is the unit you are paying for.
The Summary
A real, usable app in India in 2026 costs ₹3–12 lakh for the overwhelming majority of ideas, built cross-platform, plus 15–20% annually to keep it working. Anything far below is a template; anything far above is scope worth challenging.
The two decisions that move your number most are cross-platform versus native, and how firmly you hold your scope. Both are yours to make before a single line of code is written.
Want a specific number for your idea? Here is how I approach mobile builds, or tell me what you are trying to ship.