What does it cost to build a mobile app in 2026?

Most agencies answer this with "it depends." Here is a more useful version: for a first release with a real backend, user accounts, and both iOS and Android, budget €25,000–€60,000. Simple utility apps sit below that. Anything with payments, live chat, or heavy media sits above it.

What actually drives the number

Screens are not the cost. The cost is what sits behind them.

• The backend. An app that only displays content is cheap. An app where users create things — listings, bookings, messages — needs a server, a database, moderation and an admin. That is usually more than half the budget.
• Accounts and identity. Sign-up, password reset, sessions, and deletion. In this region, phone-number and WhatsApp-based sign-in is often the right choice and is more work than an email form.
• Payments. Anything touching money adds compliance, reconciliation and failure handling. Doubling your estimate for the payment path is not pessimistic.
• Store publishing. Review, signing keys, staged rollout, crash reporting and forced updates. Teams routinely forget this and it is never free.

Where the money gets wasted

The most expensive habit is building the second version first. Teams specify every feature they can imagine, spend nine months, launch, and discover users wanted three of them.

The second is native-for-no-reason. Two native codebases roughly double the build and every change afterwards. Unless you need deep platform integration, one cross-platform codebase serves both stores from a single change.

What a first version should contain

Enough to prove people want it. One core flow, done properly, plus analytics honest enough to tell you whether anyone completed it.

We build cross-platform from one codebase and publish under live developer accounts, so a fix reaches both stores at once. If you want a number for your specific idea rather than a range, tell us what you are building.