How Much Does a Mobile App Cost in 2026? Line by Line
It is the first question every business owner we meet asks, and it is the one the market answers worst. Type it into a search engine and you will find “somewhere between €10,000 and €500,000”. A range like that does not help you decide anything, it only tells you nobody wants to commit.
The amounts below are the ones charged on the market, taken from published rate cards and named datasets. They are not ours: ours are given on a scoping call, against a written scope, and they are firm the moment they are spoken.
The three orders of magnitude on the French market
| Deliverable | Agency price, France 2026 |
|---|---|
| MVP published on both stores | €30,000 to €60,000 |
| Business app, complete V1 | €50,000 to €90,000 |
| Complex app (multi-role, heavy integrations) | €100,000 to €150,000 and up |
The effort behind that first tier is published too: 60 to 90 person-days, all roles combined.
Sources: the public Lonestone rate card, Aquilapp, and three independent surveys that converge on the upper end. On the American side, the Clutch directory puts the average mobile project at $90,780 over 11 months, which lines up with the second row.
Two figures come up constantly mid-project and are worth putting on the table straight away. In-app payment on its own, meaning subscriptions, purchases, receipt handling and purchase restore, costs €17,500 to €20,000. The back office on its own, the web interface your teams use to run the app, costs $10,000 to $25,000.
If your quote promises an app with subscriptions and a back office for €22,000 all inclusive, you have not found a bargain. One of those three items will not be delivered.
Why the word “MVP” means nothing until you name the deliverable
This is the most expensive trap on the market, and it does not come from dishonesty.
Aquilapp advertises an MVP at €5,000. Lonestone advertises an MVP at €30,000. Both rate cards are public, both are sincere, and they are not describing the same object. The first prices a prototype: something you can demo, that runs on the founder’s phone, and that has never seen a review form. The second prices an app that has passed Apple and Google review, is available to download, with user accounts that survive an update.
Between the two there is a factor of six. The gap sits in everything that never appears on screen: publication, signing, privacy policies, account management, crash recovery, compliance with both stores’ rules.
Hence a rule that applies to any quote: cross out the word MVP and replace it with the sentence that describes the delivered state. “An app downloadable on the App Store and Google Play, with sign-up, payment and a back office” is a deliverable. “An MVP” is an intention.
Where the price comes from: days multiplied by a role rate
A mobile app quote is almost always the product of two numbers, a volume of days and a day rate per role. The rest is presentation.
Here are the rates charged in France in 2026, direct to client, excluding tax.
| Role | Day rate, France 2026 |
|---|---|
| Senior or lead mobile engineer | €600 to €850 |
| Experienced front-end developer | €477 to €535 |
| QA tester | €450 median |
| Test automation consultant | €500 median (450 to 600) |
| Experienced web designer | €423 |
| Copywriter | €412 |
Two clarifications prevent misreadings. A direct client pays 20 to 30% more than a consultancy does for the same profile, because mission marketplaces structurally underprice. And the gap between a freelance rate and an agency rate under the same job title is not a discount: these are two markets with two different commitments. Comparing them is comparing the price of a plumber with the price of a general contractor.
Do the multiplication: 70 days of mobile engineering at €700 is €49,000 of production cost, before anyone mentions design, testing or project management. That is the floor for a published app. A quote significantly below it has cut somewhere, and you have to ask where.
Those days do not read as a calendar. The conversion between person-days and calendar weeks is covered in how long it takes to build a mobile app.
The five budget lines quotes forget
1. Testing, underbudgeted by construction
French mobile agencies budget 5 to 10% of the project for quality. The testing industry puts the right level at 15 to 25% of the engineering budget. Those fifteen points of gap separate an app that holds through its first update from an app you have to reopen in a panic every two months.
Add that maintaining the tests then eats 30 to 50% of the automation budget per year, and that over a three-year total cost of ownership, 64% is human engineering.
2. Maintenance, which starts the day you publish
Apple and Google change their rules, their minimum versions and their privacy requirements every year. An app nobody touches for eighteen months is expiring. The maintenance budget belongs in the original quote, not in the first rejection notice.
3. The back office
Plenty of business owners discover after signing that “managing the content” implies a web interface that was never in scope. That is $10,000 to $25,000 of work. Better to decide to go without it than to discover it.
4. The advertising budget
It is never inside the production package, and it should not be. French law (loi Sapin) requires management fees and media buying to appear on two separate lines of the quote and the invoice, with media paid directly by the advertiser. A supplier offering you a single “acquisition, all inclusive” line is putting you out of compliance.
Keep the order of magnitude in mind too: under €1,200 to €1,500 per month, bidding algorithms never leave their learning phase, because they never reach the 30 to 50 monthly conversions they need.
5. Content and conversion
An app nobody downloads costs as much as one people download. Store listings, screenshots, landing page, activation sequence: that work has a price, and it systematically lands at the end of the project, when the budget is already spent.
What moves the price
Almost never the number of screens. Here are the real levers, in order of impact.
The state of your data comes ahead of everything else. The same screen costs three times less when the data already exists in a clean system, and three times more when it has to be dug out of an ERP with no interface designed for it.
Third-party integrations come next. Every connection to an external tool is a miniature project, with its own rules, its own failure cases and its own approximate documentation.
Roles and accounts weigh heavily too. An app where everyone sees the same thing costs a fraction of an app with administrators, teams, permissions and invitations.
Offline adds an entire layer: working without a network, then resynchronising without losing data. It is often essential in logistics and field work, and it gets decided upfront.
That leaves the number of codebases. Two teams, one iOS and one Android, means twice the work, twice the testing, twice the regressions, and behavioural differences to arbitrate between the two. A single codebase compiled for both platforms remains the default call on a business app.
What varies on a project is the scope, never the day rate. When a supplier drops the price without reducing the scope, they had overpriced at the start, or they have just decided to cut the testing.
Build or hire: the real calculation
This is the legitimate trade-off for a company planning several years of product, and it gets settled with fully loaded cost, not gross salary.
According to the official URSSAF simulator, salaried manager status in 2026, €2,500 gross per month represents €38,400 per year fully loaded, a coefficient of 1.28. At €3,000 gross you move to €48,600 per year, coefficient 1.35. At €4,000, €67,700.
The rule of thumb “multiply by 1.45” still circulates everywhere and it is wrong at those salary levels: the reform of general contribution reliefs extended them up to three times the minimum wage. Using it inflates the “hire” option by roughly €5,000 per year in your comparison.
In practice, outsourcing stays the better deal below roughly €2,500 per month of recurring scope. Above roughly €3,200 per month, hiring becomes competitive again, provided you have enough to keep the person busy all year and somebody to supervise them technically. A lone mobile engineer in a company that has no other one is a bet on their retention.
The tooling, for its part, costs almost nothing
This is the one line where the market has moved in your favour these past few years.
Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics, notifications and A/B testing are free at the scale of an app that is just starting. Amplitude gives you 2 million events per month, Mixpanel 1 million, Statsig 2 million. On the conversion side, the tooling layer is free as well, self-hosted.
The only service genuinely billed on success is subscription management of the RevenueCat kind, at 1% of tracked revenue above $2,500 per month. One deadline worth noting: Firebase remote configuration moves to a paid per-request model on 1 September 2026.
In an app budget, nearly all of the spend is therefore human work. When a quote bills you four-figure “platform licences”, ask which ones.
One case escapes this grid: when an app already exists and you have to decide whether to take it over or rewrite it. The estimate then goes through an audit, covered in taking over a failed mobile app.
The six questions to ask before signing
They take ten minutes and they remove half the bad surprises.
- What is the delivered state, in one sentence, without the word MVP? Published on both stores, or demonstrable in a meeting?
- What percentage of the budget goes to testing? Under 10%, ask what got traded away.
- Who owns the App Store Connect account, the Google Play account and the signing certificate at the end? The answer has to be: you.
- Is the source code delivered, with its history and a reproducible build procedure? Code delivered without its history is code nobody can take over.
- What happens after publication? How much fixing time is included, and at what price afterwards?
- What is not in scope? A good supplier answers that question faster than any of the others.
And our own price?
It gets given on a scoping call rather than on a page, for a simple reason: a fixed rate card lies about the real variance between projects. The same screen costs three times less when your data is clean, three times more when a legacy system has to be plugged in. Publishing a single number would mean billing both the same, which means overcharging one and working at a loss on the other.
What we can say here is the frame. We work with companies that are already taking money, on projects where the cost of the current situation can be counted in euros or in hours. The amount is announced during the call, against a written scope, and it does not move afterwards. No custom deliverable starts before a deposit.
If you want that number for your own project, the scoping questionnaire takes five minutes and it exists to prepare the call. The detail of what we deliver is on the mobile app page.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a simple mobile app cost?
On the French market, an app actually published on the App Store and Google Play starts around €30,000, and the agency range runs to €60,000 for a first scope. Below that, a quote is usually pricing a demo prototype rather than an app that has passed store review.
Why do mobile app quotes vary so much?
Because the word MVP describes no precise deliverable, and because the same screen costs three times less when the data already exists in a clean system, and three times more when it has to be pulled out of a legacy business tool with no interface built for it. What varies is the scope, not the day rate.
What is the day rate of a mobile developer in France?
A senior or lead mobile engineer sits between €600 and €850 per day working directly with the client. A QA tester is at €450 median. A direct client pays 20 to 30% more than a consultancy would for the same profile.
Is it better to outsource an app or hire a developer?
Outsourcing stays ahead below roughly €2,500 per month of recurring scope. Above roughly €3,200 per month, hiring becomes competitive again, provided you have enough work to fill the year and someone able to supervise the person technically.
Is the advertising budget included in the price of an app?
No, and it should not be. French law (loi Sapin) requires management fees and media buying to appear on two separate lines of the quote and the invoice, with the media paid directly by the advertiser.
In short
- An MVP genuinely published on both stores costs €30,000 to €60,000 at a French agency, for 60 to 90 person-days.
- The word MVP means nothing on its own: demand the sentence that describes the delivered state.
- The price comes from days multiplied by a role rate. A senior mobile engineer is at €600 to €850 per day direct to client.
- The forgotten lines are testing, maintenance, the back office, the media budget and content.
- What moves the price is the state of your data and the scope, never the rate.
- Hiring becomes competitive again above roughly €3,200 per month of recurring scope, with the real contribution coefficient (1.28 at €2,500 gross, not 1.45).