App Development Cost Estimator

It is a ballpark — typically within ±30–50% of a final quote. The estimator uses our internal benchmarks from 60+ shipped apps (including our in-house product TalkDrill) for per-feature build days. Variance comes from design fidelity (Figma rev cycles), third-party integrations (some payment SDKs are messy), regulatory needs (HIPAA, SOC2), and team composition. A 30-minute discovery call usually narrows the range by half.

Senior engineering talent in India costs less than an equivalent US developer — not because of skill differences, but due to cost-of-living and currency arbitrage. Our team has shipped iOS, Android, and web apps for clients in the US, EU, Singapore, and India using the same engineers — quality is identical, the price is the local cost basis.

MVP (0.7×): single happy path, manual QA, no error monitoring, ship in 6–10 weeks to validate the idea. Production startup (1.0×): tests, CI/CD, Sentry/Crashlytics, basic admin tooling — what investors and early users expect. Enterprise-grade (1.6×): SSO, audit logs, role-based access, SLAs, compliance docs, dedicated DevOps, security review. Most B2B startups land at production-startup; regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government) need enterprise-grade.

Surprisingly less than people fear, more than they hope. An LLM chat with RAG over your docs is roughly 10 days — using OpenAI or Anthropic APIs plus a vector DB like Pinecone. Voice AI (TTS + STT) is 14 days. Custom ML model training is the expensive one because it includes data collection, labelling, training infrastructure, and evaluation. The recurring cost is what surprises founders — budget for inference.

No. The estimator covers the build only. App Store + Google Play submissions add 3–5 days of work (screenshots, copy, ASO, review responses). Marketing budget is entirely separate. Ongoing maintenance is a yearly commitment (bug fixes, OS upgrades, library updates, minor feature adds). We scope these separately during discovery.

Yes — we choose the stack based on your needs. React Native is our default for cross-platform (one codebase, ~85% code share, fast hiring). Flutter when the design team wants pixel-identical UI on both platforms or when there is heavy custom UI. Native Swift / Kotlin when you need deep platform integration (CarPlay, Android Auto, complex camera or audio pipelines, or App Clips). The estimator assumes the most cost-effective stack for the feature set you select.