The build quote is real, and it is also not the whole story. Every app has a second budget: the one that starts the day it launches. Nobody hides it, but nobody quotes it either, because it depends on choices you have not made yet. Here it is anyway, with numbers.
The fees you pay whether you like it or not
- Apple Developer Program: $99/year. Required to put anything on the App Store.
- Google Play: $25 once. The cheapest thing in this entire article.
- App store commission: 15 to 30% of anything you sell inside the app. Most small businesses qualify for 15%. Price your subscriptions with this built in from day one, because raising prices later is harder than starting honest.
The monthly bill nobody mentions
A typical app with accounts and notifications runs $50 to $200 per month in services:
| Service | Why it costs | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting / backend | Your data lives somewhere | $10 to $100 |
| Push notifications | First 10K often free, then paid | $0 to $50 |
| Maps | Charged per load after free tier | $0 to $200 |
| Crash + performance monitoring | Finding bugs before reviews do | $0 to $50 |
| Email/SMS (logins, receipts) | Per message | $0 to $50 |
Chat, video, or heavy media push these numbers up fast. That is fine, as long as you knew before launch instead of discovering it on month two's invoice.
The second platform question
"Can we also get it on Android?" is a pricing question, not a favor. With React Native or Flutter, most code is shared, so Android is not 2x. It is realistically +30 to 50%: device testing, platform quirks, a second store review process, a second set of crashes.
What it is NOT: free. If a quote implies both platforms cost the same as one, someone is not planning to test.
The update treadmill
This is the one that surprises owners most. Your finished app is not finished:
- iOS and Android ship major OS updates every year
- Phones change screen sizes and notches
- Login providers, payment SDKs, and maps APIs deprecate things on their schedule, not yours
- Stores require you to target current SDK versions within about a year
So the honest budget line is 15 to 20% of the build cost per year for updates and small fixes. Skip it, and the app does not freeze in place. It decays until one day it will not install for new users, and the fix is a paid revival project instead of routine maintenance.
The costs that are actually choices
- Admin dashboard: near-zero if you use an off-the-shelf database tool, four figures if you want it pretty
- Support: every login problem, refund, and "the button does not work" lands on you or someone you pay
- Marketing: a launch without any costs exactly what it earns
The one-line budget that would have saved most owners I meet
Build cost + 15 to 20% per year for upkeep + $50 to $200 per month in services + store fees. If your business model does not survive those numbers, the app idea needs adjusting, not the quote.
If you tell me what your app would actually do, I will give you the realistic all-in number, build and run, before you spend anything.