How Much Does an App Cost in the UK?

If you’re pricing up an app in the UK, you’ve probably noticed how hard it is to get a straight number out of anyone. Most agencies won’t publish a figure at all, so here’s ours before anything else: a clickable, testable prototype starts from £5,000, and a full app build — design, development, backend and launch — starts from £15,000. Most builds sit in that range and take around three months. Larger, multi-feature platforms cost more, and we’ll tell you exactly why before you commit a penny.

That’s the honest answer to “how much does it cost to build an app in the UK”, and the rest of this article explains what moves that number up and down, so you can work out roughly where your idea lands before you ever get on a call.

The short answer: what an app costs in the UK

Here is how our app development pricing breaks down, all fixed and agreed before work starts:

• Design and clickable prototype (2–4 weeks): from £5,000. Your app designed screen by screen and a prototype you can tap through on a real device — enough to test with users or show investors before you fund the full build.
• Full app build (around 3 months): from £15,000. iOS, Android or cross-platform, with the backend, APIs and integrations included, and App Store and Google Play submission handled.
• Larger multi-feature platforms: more, scoped case by case. Several user types, heavy integrations, real-time features or compliance requirements all push the number up. We price these honestly rather than pretending they fit a template.
• After launch: from £400 a month. Ongoing maintenance, fixes and improvements as the app grows.

Two things are true of every number above. The price is fixed before we write a line of code, and you own all the code and IP once the work is delivered and paid for. You’re not renting the app from us, and there’s no meter running.

What actually drives app development cost

The reason quotes for “the same app” can differ by a factor of ten is that almost nobody is describing the same app. Cost tracks scope, and scope is made of six things.

Features. Every screen, every rule, every “wouldn’t it be good if it also…” is time. The single biggest saving available to you is deciding what the first version genuinely needs versus what it can add later. This is where most budgets are won or lost.

Platforms — iOS, Android and web. A cross-platform build using one codebase to serve both app stores is usually the right economics: one thing to build, one thing to maintain. Going fully native for iOS and Android separately roughly doubles the surface area, so we only recommend it where the product truly needs it — a surveyors’ app we prototyped is native iPad precisely because it drives laser-measuring hardware, and that’s a real reason, not a default.

Integrations. Payments, maps, identity checks, a CRM, a booking system, someone else’s API — each connection is work, and each one behaves differently in the real world than it does in the docs. A handful of clean integrations is cheap; a tangle of legacy systems that were never meant to talk to each other is not.

Design. A lot of design cost hides in the flows, not the pixels — the paths a user takes, the edge cases, the error states. Products that feel simple to use are usually the ones that took the most design thought. This is money well spent, because a confusing app fails no matter how well it’s engineered.

The backend. What happens behind the screens is often more than half the build. Accounts, data, notifications, admin tools, security — an app that stores and moves real information needs proper infrastructure underneath it, and that’s true even when the app itself looks minimal.

Maintenance. An app is never “done” the way a leaflet is done. Operating systems change, libraries need updating, users find bugs, and you’ll want to add the things they ask for. Budget for the life of the app, not just its birth.

Rough cost ranges by app type

These are the bands we see most often, based on the projects we’ve delivered rather than any published industry average. Treat them as a starting sense of scale, not a quote.

App type	Typical starting cost	What you get
Design & prototype	From £5,000	A real, tappable version to put in front of users and investors — the cheapest way to find out whether it’s worth building at all
Lean MVP / focused app	From £15,000	A genuinely working product doing one job well, live on both app stores. Where most first-time founders should aim
Fuller consumer or business app	£15,000 and up	More features, integrations and polish — still one clear product, scoped tightly
Multi-feature platform	More again, case by case	Multiple user types, subscriptions, dashboards, real-time features. Worth it once the product has proven itself

If you’re weighing custom software against an off-the-shelf tool, that’s a real fork in the road. Sometimes buying is the honest answer, and we’ll say so — bespoke software earns its cost when the workarounds start costing real hours, not before.

The ongoing costs people forget

The build is the visible number. These are the ones that catch people out:

• Maintenance and support — from £400 a month with us, more for busier apps.
• Hosting and infrastructure — the servers, databases and services your app runs on. Modest for a new app, and it scales with your users, which is a good problem to have.
• App store fees — Apple and Google take a commission on in-app payments of digital goods (up to 30%, or 15% for many smaller developers), plus an annual developer-account cost — Apple’s is $99/year (Apple Developer). Worth knowing before you model revenue.
• Third-party services — payment processing, SMS, email, maps and the like usually bill per use.

None of these are large individually, but they’re real, and an honest quote accounts for them instead of letting them surprise you in month two.

The cheapest way to build an app: start lean

The most reliable way to keep app development cost sensible isn’t finding a cheaper developer. It’s building less to begin with.

A tightly scoped MVP — the smallest version that tests your riskiest assumption with real users — costs a fraction of a fully featured app and, crucially, tells you what’s actually worth building next. Everything you were sure users would want, but built on a hunch, is where budgets get burned.

Two of our own projects show what that looks like in practice.

When personal-training startup Simple PT came to us on a tight budget, we were honest about what that meant. We planned the build in stages, shipped a deliberately lean MVP first to test the concept, and deferred the paid extras to later iterations. Two months from kick-off, a working booking-and-payments app was live on both app stores. Years on, that approach — stage the build, ship the lean version first, let real use decide what comes next — is still the one we recommend to founders watching the budget.

At the other end of the scale, a small, sharply defined idea can ship remarkably fast. We designed, built and launched Aflé Bijoux’s Adinkra app — a catalogue of 130 cultural symbols on iOS and Android — with the development phase done in under a month. One clear idea, fixed scope, finished properly. You can see the full range of what we’ve built to get a feel for how different budgets translate into different products.

How we price, and why it’s fixed

Founders worry that agencies drag projects out and quietly upsell along the way. It’s a fair worry, and it’s why we work the way we do.

The scope and price are agreed as a fixed number before anything starts — no cost creep, no surprise invoices. Payment is split into milestones, so you only ever pay as we deliver, never a large sum up front against a promise. If it’s not working out, you can cancel within the first 21 days and get your money back in full. And when the work is done and paid for, the code and IP are entirely yours.

We publish our starting prices, including the £5,000 floor for a scoped build, for the same reason we wrote this article: so you can do the sums yourself and decide whether it’s worth a conversation before you have one. You can see the full breakdown on our pricing section.

Working out your number

If you’ve read this far, you can probably already place your idea in one of the bands above — a prototype to test it, a lean MVP to launch it, or a bigger platform once it’s proven. That alone puts you ahead of most people commissioning their first app.

Choosing who builds it matters as much as what it costs, and the two questions are related — the cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest project once you count the rebuilds. If you’re weighing up partners, our guide to how to choose an AI and automation agency covers the questions worth asking before you sign anything.

And if you’d rather sanity-check a number with someone who’s shipped 50-plus of these, that’s a free conversation. You’ll leave it with a realistic range for your idea and an honest view of whether it’s worth building yet — even if the answer is “start smaller”.