App cost calculator

Our real starting rates, not an industry survey.

Most app cost calculators online multiply an hourly rate by a list of screens and hand you a number that nobody will honor. This one starts from what Acasa Labs actually charges. A website or catalogue site starts at $1,500 to $3,000 and takes one to two weeks. A mobile app MVP for iOS and Android starts at $2,000 to $5,000 and takes three to five weeks. A web app or SaaS MVP starts at $4,000 to $8,000, also three to five weeks. An AI pilot, meaning RAG or a chatbot over one document set, starts at $5,000 to $10,000. Our minimum project is $1,500.

If you would rather have a developer on your team than a fixed project, a full-time developer is $1,500 to $2,000 a month and a half-time developer is $750 to $1,000 a month. After launch, maintenance runs $100 to $300 a month, covering updates, monitoring, small fixes, and keeping the app current with new iOS and Android versions.

We are a small team in Surat, India, and we build our own products as well as client work: NoteTube, Kraftr, Pullsy, GymFast, and SigmaCPM all run on code we wrote. That is why these numbers hold. They come from shipping real apps, not from a rate card.

What moves the range, and by how much.

You pick what you are building, which platforms it needs, which features the first version must have, and how firm the deadline is. The calculator starts from the base for that kind of build and widens the range for each feature. User accounts barely move it, because almost every app needs a sign-in. Payments or subscriptions, an admin panel, and integrations with a CRM, an ERP, or WhatsApp each add a week or so. An AI feature adds the most, because search, chat, and extraction need an evaluation step before they can be trusted. Offline support adds sync logic that has to handle conflicts.

A second surface costs extra but not double. A web app that also ships iOS and Android apps shares its backend, its data model, and most of its business rules, so the mobile apps are a smaller job than building them alone. A mobile app built with React Native and Expo covers iPhone and Android from one codebase, so dropping one of the two barely changes the price.

A hard deadline sooner than the usual timeline means more people working at once. That shortens the calendar but adds coordination, so the price goes up by about a fifth. A flexible deadline does not lower the price, but it lets us phase the work so you launch the core first and pay for the rest once you have users.

When the answers add up to something well past our standard starting point, a long feature list, or a mix that does not fit one of the bases, the calculator does not invent a number. It says the work is scoped after a call. That is not a sales trick. A wrong estimate on a large build is worse than none, and thirty minutes of questions gets you a real figure.

An estimate is a starting point for a conversation.

Every result here is an estimate. The number you can hold us to comes in a written plan after a short call: the scope, the timeline, and a fixed price or a monthly rate. Press Send me this estimate and the contact form opens with your answers already written into the message, so you do not have to explain it twice.

The things that most often change a number are the ones a form cannot see: an old system the new one has to talk to, data that needs cleaning before it can be imported, approval from a team that is not in the room, or a design that already exists and has to be matched. Tell us about those in the message and the plan will account for them. You own the code, the repository, and the cloud accounts from day one, whichever way we bill.