Ask three shops to quote the same app and you'll get $9,000, $60,000, and $250,000 — for the same idea. None of them are lying. They're pricing different assumptions about scope, platforms, and who does the work. Here's the honest 2026 map, and why the old numbers are collapsing.
The short answer
- Template / no-code build — $2,000–$10,000. Fast and fine for validating demand; you'll hit the ceiling the first time you need something the template didn't anticipate.
- Focused MVP (one platform, a few core flows) — $8,000–$35,000 with a small AI-native team; $25,000–$75,000 at a traditional agency.
- Mid-size product (accounts, payments, admin, real backend) — $40,000–$120,000.
- Complex or regulated (marketplaces, health/fintech, heavy real-time) — $150,000 and up, mostly for reasons that aren't code.
Same idea, wildly different builds. What moves you between tiers isn't ambition — it's the spec.
What actually drives the number
Six dials set an app's price, and each one multiplies the others:
- Scope — the honest count of screens and flows. Not "it's basically Uber."
- Platforms — iOS, Android, web. Each addition roughly doubles surface area to design, build, and test.
- Backend — a static app is cheap; accounts, sync, and roles are not.
- Integrations — payments, maps, calendars, third-party APIs. Each is a week, not an afternoon.
- Design fidelity — template-adjacent vs. a brand with taste. (You're on a site that cares; we're biased.)
- Who builds it — offshore hourly, freelancer, agency, or a small senior team with AI leverage.
Where the money goes
On a typical fixed-scope build, the spend splits roughly like this: discovery and product definition (10%), design (15–20%), build (50–60%), testing and hardening (10–15%), and launch logistics — store review, analytics, crash reporting — the last 5%. Then the part quotes leave out: maintenance, at 15–20% of the build cost per year. OS updates, dependency patches, the small improvements users ask for. Budget it up front and it never surprises you.
How AI changed the math (for real this time)
The 2026 shift isn't that AI writes your app. It's that a small senior team with serious AI leverage ships what used to take a ten-person agency — the build hours compress 2–5×, and the payroll behind your quote compresses with them. That's the entire mechanism behind "$8k–$35k MVP" replacing "$50k minimum."
What AI doesn't compress: deciding what the product is, designing something with a point of view, testing on real devices, surviving app-store review, and the judgment to leave things out. That's the work you're actually hiring for — the typing got cheap; the thinking didn't.
The typing got cheap. The thinking didn't.
How to spend less without getting less
- One platform first. Web to validate, or iOS-first for consumer. Add the second when the first earns it.
- Cut scope, not quality. Ship three excellent flows, not nine mediocre ones. You can always add; you can't un-ship junk.
- Buy, don't build. Auth, payments, analytics — solved problems. Custom-building them is how budgets die.
- Demand weekly demos. If you can't see it running every week, you're funding a surprise.
- Fix the scope, then the price. Hourly billing on a vague spec is a blank check. A tight brief gets you a real number.
How we price it
Every Five Line project starts with a five-line brief — the idea, the user, the screens that matter, the brand, the ship date. Five lines make the scope honest, and honest scope is what makes a fixed quote possible. From there we build in fixed-scope sprints with a demo every week, using the same AI-native process we use on our own apps and games.
Have something in mind? Bring us your five lines — we'll tell you what it costs, in writing, before you commit to anything.