App Development Cost Estimator

It is a ballpark — typically within ±30–50% of a final quote. The estimator uses our internal benchmarks from 60+ shipped apps (including our in-house products PenLeap and TalkDrill) for per-feature build days and India-anchored USD rates. Variance comes from design fidelity (Figma rev cycles), third-party integrations (some payment SDKs are messy), regulatory needs (HIPAA, SOC2), and team composition. A 30-minute discovery call usually narrows the range by half.

Senior engineering talent in India costs 30–40% of an equivalent US developer — not because of skill differences, but due to cost-of-living and currency arbitrage. The same React Native developer who codes a fintech app in Bengaluru would charge 2.5× working from San Francisco. Our team has shipped iOS, Android, and web apps for clients in the US, EU, Singapore, and India using the same engineers — quality is identical, the price is the local cost basis.

MVP (0.7×): single happy path, manual QA, no error monitoring, ship in 6–10 weeks to validate the idea. Production startup (1.0×): tests, CI/CD, Sentry/Crashlytics, basic admin tooling — what investors and early users expect. Enterprise-grade (1.6×): SSO, audit logs, role-based access, SLAs, compliance docs, dedicated DevOps, security review. Most B2B startups land at production-startup; regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government) need enterprise-grade.

Surprisingly less than people fear, more than they hope. An LLM chat with RAG over your docs is roughly $5,000 / 10 days at India rates — using OpenAI or Anthropic APIs plus a vector DB like Pinecone. Voice AI (TTS + STT) is $7,000 / 14 days. Custom ML model training is the expensive one ($15,000+) because it includes data collection, labelling, training infrastructure, and evaluation. The recurring cost is what surprises founders — budget another $500–$3,000/month for inference.

No. The estimator covers build cost only. App Store + Google Play submissions add ~$200 in fees and 3–5 days of work (screenshots, copy, ASO, review responses). Marketing budget is entirely separate — most B2C apps need 5–10× the build budget for paid acquisition to validate. Ongoing maintenance is typically 15–25% of the original build cost annually (bug fixes, OS upgrades, library updates, minor feature adds). We scope these separately during discovery.

Yes — we choose the stack based on your needs. React Native is our default for cross-platform (one codebase, ~85% code share, fast hiring). Flutter when the design team wants pixel-identical UI on both platforms or when there is heavy custom UI. Native Swift / Kotlin when you need deep platform integration (CarPlay, Android Auto, complex camera or audio pipelines, or App Clips). The estimator assumes the most cost-effective stack for the feature set you select.