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App development cost calculator

Most cost calculators return one number and hide the maths. This one shows the hours behind the price, splits them by role, and lets you price the same app in six regions. No email required.

Features

Pick what the first version actually needs. You can always add later.

A per feature speedup, larger on well-trodden work. Switch it off for the AI-agnostic baseline that market prices describe.

Each feature shows how much less, or more, work it becomes. Why these numbers?

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Your app

Low-code figures come from our own delivery across the FlutterFlow projects in our portfolio, not from published research. FlutterFlow compresses well-trodden screens and costs more on offline sync, realtime and custom AI, where you end up writing code anyway.

How this is calculated

Role split

Hours are the source of truth. Money is hours times a regional rate, which is why the same app is priced very differently in Budapest and San Francisco.

  • App development 45%
  • Backend 25%
  • UI and UX design 11%
  • QA and testing 11%
  • Project management 8%

Calibrated against our own two cost guides, which agree that development and backend are roughly 70 percent of the work and QA is 11 to 15 percent.

Hourly rates by region

Region Freelancer Small studio Agency
US or Canada $76 $119 $184
UK or Western Europe $59 $92 $135
Nordics or DACH $65 $97 $146
Hungary or Central Europe $29 $40 $59
Latin America $38 $54 $76
India or Southeast Asia $22 $32 $49

Blended senior rates. A freelancer, a small studio and an agency price the same hour very differently, and that gap is usually larger than any feature you could cut. Our Hungarian column sits at the floor of the published market bands and, at agency level, a little below them: we run lean and we build with AI leverage, so less overhead rides on every hour we bill.

How the Hungarian rate is derived

  1. 1 A senior developer in Hungary earns 1.5 to 2.2 million forint gross per month. We anchor on 1,500,000 Ft, the lower half of that band, because a delivery team is senior-led with mid-level hands, so the blended salary behind one billable hour sits below what a senior earns alone.
  2. 2 Adding 13 percent social contribution puts the employer cost at 1,695,000 Ft per month.
  3. 3 About 130 of roughly 168 monthly hours are billable, so one billable developer hour costs about 13,000 Ft fully loaded. That figure already carries holiday, sick days and internal non-billable time, so nothing below charges them a second time.
  4. 4 A lean studio adds about 14 percent for tooling, accounting and the non-billing side of the business. That is our studio rate: 14,800 Ft per hour.
  5. 5 A full agency also carries account management, a sales function and an office. Roughly 35 percent overhead and a 25 percent margin put the agency rate near 22,000 Ft per hour.
  6. 6 The freelancer row is not derived from employment cost, because a solo senior has no employer and no social contribution on a salary. 10,800 Ft per hour is what a solo senior bills, inside the published Budapest range.

Does AI make app development cheaper?

Yes, but not evenly, and anyone quoting you a single AI discount is guessing. The measured effect swings by more than 70 points depending on what kind of work it is, so this calculator puts the speedup on each feature rather than on the total.

Study Finding What kind of work
Peng et al. 2023, GitHub randomised trial, 95 developers 55.8 percent faster Write an HTTP server in JavaScript. Greenfield, self-contained, very well-trodden.
METR 2025 randomised trial, 16 experienced maintainers, 246 tasks 19 percent slower Real tasks in large mature repositories the developers already knew well. They believed they were 20 percent faster.
METR follow-up, February 2026 About 18 percent faster Same developers, better tools, learned workflows. METR calls this preliminary evidence.
Industry surveys, 2025 to 2026 About 10 percent Everything averaged together, including the parts AI is bad at.
DORA 2025 Incidents per pull request up 242 percent Why the saving does not carry through to QA.

So the speedup goes on the feature

High, about 35 percent

Login, profiles, onboarding, search, admin dashboards. Well-trodden and self-contained, the shape of work the GitHub trial measured. We stay well under its 55.8 percent ceiling, because a shipped feature also carries integration, review and rework that an isolated task does not.

Medium, about 20 percent

Payments, maps, push, subscriptions, booking. The core is templatable, but third-party SDKs, store configuration and edge cases do not compress.

Low, about 8 percent

Chat, offline sync, real-time, AI features, custom integrations, and the project shell itself. Novel, stateful and hard to verify. This is where the METR result lives.

QA only drops 10 percent, deliberately. DORA measured incidents per pull request up 242 percent and bugs per developer up 54 percent across the industry. AI-assisted code moves work into testing, so passing the development saving straight through to QA would be dishonest.

Across a typical six feature build that blends to roughly 20 percent, which is close to what METR now measures and nowhere near the numbers you see in sales decks.

What the estimate does not include

  • Apple Developer Program at 99 USD per year and Google Play at 25 USD once.
  • Store commission of 15 percent under 1M USD in annual revenue, 30 percent above it.
  • Payment processing, typically 2.9 percent plus a fixed fee per transaction.
  • Maintenance, which runs 15 to 25 percent of the build cost every year even with no new features.
  • Infrastructure, third-party subscriptions, content production and paid acquisition.
  • Platform subscriptions on a low-code build, FlutterFlow included.

Over three years, total cost of ownership usually lands at 1.5 to 2 times the initial build.

How to bring this down

  • Ship one platform first. Cross-platform is cheaper than two native builds, but one store is cheaper than both.
  • Cut to the features that prove the idea. Everything else is version two, priced with real usage data behind it.
  • While you are validating, a FlutterFlow build gets the well-trodden screens up faster. Move to custom code when the hard parts arrive.

Where these numbers come from

Rates are cross-checked against published market data and, for Hungary, derived from actual senior developer salaries rather than copied from an offshore rate listicle. The derivation below is computed from those same inputs, so this panel and the rate table above it cannot drift apart.

Frequently asked questions

It is an estimate, not a quote, which is why it returns a range rather than a single number. The hours behind it are calibrated against published market prices and against our own two cost guides. A real quote needs your screens, your data model and your integrations, and that comes out of a discovery call.

Because you are paying for hours, and an hour of senior engineering costs very different amounts in Budapest, Berlin and San Francisco. A Hungarian studio typically comes in at a third to a half of a Western European agency for the same scope and the same seniority.

On some work, a lot. On other work, not at all. A randomised GitHub trial measured developers 55.8 percent faster on a self-contained greenfield task, while a METR trial measured experienced developers 19 percent slower on real tasks in codebases they knew well. This calculator applies the speedup per feature for that reason, and it lands around 20 percent across a typical build. It deliberately does not pass the saving through to QA, because DORA measured incidents per pull request rising 242 percent industry-wide.

One codebase, one set of business logic, one set of bug fixes. Building the same app natively for iOS and Android runs roughly 1.6 to 1.8 times the cost. Native still wins for heavy graphics, deep OS integration or very high performance demands.

Store fees, payment processing, infrastructure, content and marketing. Most importantly, maintenance: budget 15 to 25 percent of the build cost every year just to keep the app working as the operating systems move under it. Over three years the total lands at roughly 1.5 to 2 times the initial build.

Almost always, by cutting scope rather than by cutting rates. Shipping one platform, using a hosted backend and dropping to the features that actually prove the idea moves the number far more than negotiating an hourly rate. Cutting QA does not: it moves the cost to later and adds interest.

On the well-trodden parts, clearly. Login, profiles, onboarding, list screens and an admin panel come together far faster, which is why the calculator takes about a quarter off a typical MVP when you pick it. On offline sync, realtime, deep integrations and custom AI it is the other way round: you end up writing code inside the tool anyway, so those features cost more, and the calculator shows them going up rather than down. Our rule of thumb is the same one we publish in our guides: validate in low-code, move to custom code when the hard parts arrive. These figures come from our own FlutterFlow projects rather than from published research, and we say so on the page.

No. The estimate updates on the page and nothing is sent anywhere. If you want it turned into a real proposal, that is what the contact form and the discovery call are for.
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