How much does an iOS app cost in 2026?

We get asked this before anything else, so here's a straight answer with the ranges you'll actually encounter.

What agencies charge

A traditional agency in New York, London, or San Francisco quotes a consumer iOS app somewhere between $80,000 and $250,000. A "simple" app with login, a feed, and a settings screen usually lands near the bottom of that range. Anything with payments, real-time sync, or a companion web app pushes toward the top.

Offshore agencies quote a third of that. Some of those projects turn out fine. Many come back needing a rebuild once the first real users show up.

Freelancers run $15,000 to $60,000 for the same scope, with wide variance in what you actually receive at the end. Some hand you an Xcode project and a shrug. The good ones are booked six months out.

What actually drives the number

The price isn't about how many screens you have. It's about how many people touch the project and how many times work changes hands.

Here's where an agency's $120,000 goes:

• Discovery and strategy, 15 to 20 percent. Workshops, personas, competitive decks.
• Design, 20 to 25 percent. Wireframes, then mockups, then a clickable prototype, then revisions to all three.
• Engineering, 35 to 40 percent. The part that produces the app.
• Project management and QA, 15 to 20 percent. Standups, tickets, test passes, status reports.

More than half the invoice pays for coordination and artifacts. The app itself is the minority line item.

What we charge

Our projects run about half of a comparable agency quote. A single builder working with the strongest development tooling available does the discovery, design, engineering, and QA in one continuous pass. There's no handoff, so there's nothing to coordinate and no artifact to produce for its own sake.

Concretely: send us the other firm's quote and we'll price the same scope at about half, with a first build in your hands within days and production grade in as little as ten days. App Store submitted, deployed, monitored.

Things that legitimately cost more

Some requirements add real work no matter who builds it:

• Offline-first sync. A local database, conflict resolution, and a sync engine. Budget an extra week.
• Video or audio processing. Encoding pipelines, background playback, CarPlay. Each one is its own subsystem.
• Regulated data. Healthcare and finance have audit and encryption requirements that shape the architecture from day one.
• An Android version. We'll tell you honestly when that's worth doing and when it isn't.

How to read a quote

Ask for the breakdown by phase. If discovery and design together exceed 40 percent of the total, you're buying decks. Ask what you receive at the end: a repo you own, a CI pipeline, App Store Connect access, documentation? Ask how many people will touch the code.

Then ask us for a comparison. Paste the other quote into our form and we'll tell you where we'd land and why.