How Much Does an App Cost in the UK in 2026?

The honest range for a business app built in the UK runs from around £15,000 to well over £150,000, which is not a useful sentence on its own. What follows is the reasoning that puts a specific app somewhere inside it.

First: do you need an app?

An app is worth building when it needs something a website in a phone browser cannot do well: offline use, the camera or GPS as a core feature, push notifications people will actually want, or a presence on the home screen that changes behaviour. If the requirement is "customers can log in and see their stuff on their phone", a well-built responsive web application does that for a third of the price - see our web application cost guide. We turn away app projects for this reason regularly, and we would rather do that than build something that gets deleted after one use.

UK price bands in 2026

• £15,000 to £35,000 - a focused app with a handful of screens, user accounts, a simple backend and one or two integrations. A field-team tool, a loyalty app, a booking app for one business. Cross-platform, 8 to 12 weeks including store submission.
• £35,000 to £80,000 - the typical business app: several user types, offline capability, notifications, payments, a proper admin backend, integration with the systems the business runs on. 12 to 20 weeks.
• £80,000 to £150,000+ - marketplaces, apps with real-time features, anything with regulatory weight (health, finance), or a product where the app is the business. Phased over six months or more.

These are UK-team prices. The gap to offshore quotes is wide and the reasons it closes over a project are the same as for any software: management time, rework and time-zone friction. We cover our approach on the mobile app development page.

What moves the number

Native, cross-platform or both

One cross-platform codebase (Flutter or React Native) serving iOS and Android is 30 to 40 percent cheaper than two native apps and is the right default for most business apps. Native is worth the premium when the app leans hard on device hardware, needs the last few percent of performance, or has to follow platform design conventions precisely. We wrote up the trade-off in native versus cross-platform.

The backend nobody mentions

Every app with accounts, data or sync has a server side: an API, a database, authentication, an admin panel. It is often a third to a half of the total and it is the part most likely to be missing from a first quote. Ask explicitly: what is the backend, who builds it, who hosts it, and do I own it.

Offline and sync

"It should work without signal" sounds small. Handling conflicts when two people edit the same record offline, queuing uploads, and making it all invisible to the user is real engineering. Budget 15 to 25 percent extra for proper offline support.

Integrations

Payments (Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay), maps, messaging, your CRM, your accounting system. Each is a small project. Payment handling in particular carries compliance obligations that push cost up.

Design

Apps are judged on feel more than websites are. A designed app - proper flows, states, empty screens, error handling, accessibility - costs more than a developer's best guess and gets used more. Budget 10 to 20 percent of the total for design.

Store submission and what it adds

Apple and Google review every app. Expect two to three weeks for first approval on iOS, plus time for at least one rejection and resubmission. Both stores charge developer fees (Apple's is annual). We submit under your own developer accounts so the listing is yours, and we cover the process in our store submission checklist.

Year two: the costs that surprise people

• OS updates. iOS and Android each ship a major version every year, and each one breaks something. Budget for two maintenance releases a year at minimum.
• Hosting and services. Backend hosting, push notification services, crash reporting, maps and SMS quotas: £50 to £500 a month depending on scale.
• Store compliance. New privacy labels, permission rules and API deprecations arrive regularly and are not optional.
• Maintenance. 15 to 20 percent of the build cost per year is realistic for an app you want to keep in the stores in good standing.

An app that costs £40,000 to build will cost £8,000 to £12,000 a year to keep alive. Anyone who quotes you the first number without the second is not being straight with you.

Getting a real number

Three apps, priced

A field-service app for a maintenance company

Engineers see today's jobs, navigate to them, complete checklists with photos and a customer signature, and the job sheet syncs to the office system when signal returns. One user type, offline-first, one integration (the office system's API, which we also build), cross-platform. Around £30,000 to £45,000 including the backend and admin screens, twelve to fourteen weeks.

A loyalty and booking app for a group of salons

Customers browse services, book, pay a deposit, collect points, receive offers by push. Staff use the existing booking system's admin. Two user types (customer, admin), payments, push, integration with the booking system. £35,000 to £55,000, fourteen to sixteen weeks including store review.

A member app for a professional body

Members log in, access resources, log CPD, register for events, renew membership, receive notices. Integration with the membership database and payment provider, document library, offline reading. £50,000 to £80,000, phased.

The order of work

Discovery and design first, with clickable prototypes reviewed on real phones before development. Backend and API, so the app has something to talk to. The app itself, in two-week builds installed on your own devices via test distribution. Store preparation in parallel: accounts, listing assets, privacy declarations. Submission, review, launch. Then the support window, and a maintenance plan for the OS updates that arrive every autumn.

Questions to ask any app quote

• Does this include the backend, and who owns and hosts it?
• Is it native or cross-platform, and why for this app?
• Which developer accounts will the app be published under?
• What does year two cost?
• What happens if a store rejects it - who fixes what, and is it included?

Where quotes go wrong

The lowest quotes almost always omit something: the backend, the admin panel, store submission, or design. Ask for a line-by-line scope and check each of those four is present. The highest quotes often include work you do not need yet - a second platform, features for a later phase, a level of polish appropriate for a consumer app rather than an internal tool. A good quote sits in the middle, itemised, with a phase-two list of things deliberately left out. If two quotes on the same brief differ by more than half, they are not quoting the same app, and the difference is worth a conversation before you choose.

Write down who uses the app and the five things each of them does, whether it needs to work offline, what it must connect to, and whether it is iOS, Android or both. That is enough for a fixed quote. Send it over and we will tell you what it costs - and whether it should be an app at all.

Want a starting figure now? Try the instant price estimator - set a budget, pick a platform, and see where you land before you send us the brief.