How much does it cost to build an app in 2026? Our real numbers.

Every answer to this question online is a range from $5,000 to $500,000. That's useless. Here is what we charge at Node & Scale, a two-person studio that ships its own products and builds for founders on the side. Real ranges, real weeks, USD, September 2026.

If you want the number for your idea specifically, the cost calculator does it in about thirty seconds.

The short table

What you're building	Weeks	What we charge
Landing page + waitlist	1	$1,500 to $3,000
Small tool (sign-in, one core flow)	2 to 3	$4,000 to $7,000
Full web product, first version	5 to 7	$10,000 to $20,000
Two-sided marketplace (MeltsWell size)	6 to 9	$15,000 to $25,000
Mobile app (iOS + Android) with backend	7 to 10	$15,000 to $30,000
Web + mobile together	9 to 12	$20,000 to $40,000

Fixed scope, fixed price. You own the code and the repo from day one. A demo every week.

For comparison: a US or UK agency quotes $50,000 to $150,000 for the middle rows. A freelancer on Upwork quotes $5,000 to $30,000 for the same thing, and the variance in what you get back is the whole story.

How much does it cost to make an app, really

The price is mostly people-weeks. A build takes as long as it takes to make the screens, wire the data, handle the edge cases, and test it on real devices. Everything below either adds weeks or removes them.

What adds cost

• Two platforms. Web and mobile are two apps, even with one codebase. Budget about 2× a single platform.
• Payments. Stripe is easy. Payouts to sellers, refunds, disputes, and tax are not. $1,500 to $3,000 on top.
• An admin dashboard. You'll want one by week two. $1,500 to $2,500.
• Notifications. Push and email, with the settings screen nobody wants to build. $800 to $1,500.
• Search and filters. Harder than it looks once there's real data. $800 to $1,500.
• Maps and location. $1,000 to $2,000.
• An AI feature. Prompting is cheap. Making it reliable is not. $2,000 to $5,000.
• Custom brand and motion. A site like this one costs about 15% more than a clean build on a design system.

What removes cost

• A written scope. One page. What the first version does, what it doesn't. Founders who send this get a quote in two days and a lower one.
• Cutting the second user type. A marketplace needs buyers and sellers. Most other ideas don't need "admin, manager, and viewer" roles in version one.
• Using boring infrastructure. Supabase, Vercel, Expo, Resend. We don't charge to set these up because we've done it twenty times.
• Skipping native. Expo gives you iOS and Android from one codebase. Going native doubles the mobile line.

How much does it cost to create an app prototype or MVP

A prototype that clicks through but doesn't work: $1,500 to $3,000, a week. Useful for pitching, useless for learning.

An MVP that real people can use: the "small tool" or "full product" row above. We push founders toward the small tool. Two to three weeks, $4,000 to $7,000, in front of real users. If it's wrong you find out for $5,000 instead of $50,000. This is the row most founders should start on. What goes in it, and what waits, is in MVP development for startups.

iOS vs Android: does it change the price?

Not with us. We build mobile with Expo, which ships both from one codebase. The "mobile app" row already covers both stores. Going native Swift plus Kotlin roughly doubles that row and adds a month. There are reasons to do it. Most first versions don't have them.

What we'd charge to build MeltsWell today

MeltsWell is our own product: a leaderboard and marketplace for home bakers. Web, two user types, listings, search, photo uploads, orders that hand off to WhatsApp instead of in-app payments.

If a founder brought us that exact spec: the marketplace row, plus search, plus uploads, no payments. $17,000 to $28,000, seven to nine weeks. The no-payments decision alone saved a couple of weeks and a lot of edge cases. That's the kind of call we make with you in the scoping call, and it's usually where the money is. The rest of what we learned is in how to build a marketplace app.

Why agency quotes are 3 to 5× higher

Not because the code is better. Account managers, project managers, a design phase that runs a month before anyone sees a screen, and an office. You pay for the layers between you and the person typing.

Our layers: zero. You talk to the person building it. That's the whole reason the numbers above are possible.

What you get for the money

• A scoping call, then a written scope and a fixed price within a few days.
• A demo every week from week one.
• The repo in your GitHub from day one. No hostage code.
• Deployed on your own accounts (Vercel, Supabase, app stores). You hold the keys.
• Two weeks of fixes after launch, included.

Get your number

Use the calculator for a range in thirty seconds, or tell us what you're building and get a real quote after one call.