How Much Does It Cost to Build an App in the UK?

Any number quoted without knowing your scope is a guess. What's useful instead is understanding what actually drives cost, so you can reason about roughly where your project sits and have a productive first conversation with whoever builds it.

The Biggest Driver: Scope

A single-screen utility app with no backend and a multi-screen product with user accounts, a database, and third-party integrations are not the same order of magnitude, even though both are "an app." Before cost, define scope: what does the app actually need to do, for whom, and what happens on the backend versus the device.

Platform Choice

Native development on iOS and Android separately roughly doubles the frontend work compared to a single cross-platform codebase (React Native or Flutter) covering both. Cross-platform isn't automatically cheaper once you account for platform-specific polish, but it's usually the lower-cost starting point when both platforms are needed from day one.

Backend & Integrations

An app with no backend — no accounts, no server-side data — is the cheapest category. Add user accounts, a database, an API layer, and it becomes a two-sided build: app plus backend system. Each third-party integration (payments, calendars, CRMs, other APIs) adds defined, usually estimable scope on top.

Design

Working from an existing brand and design system costs less than a full custom UI/UX design pass. If the product is customer-facing and design quality affects conversion or retention, this isn't a place to cut corners — but it is a real cost input.

What This Means Practically

Rather than anchoring on a number you've seen elsewhere, the more useful exercise is scoping: write down what the app needs to do, which platforms, whether it needs a backend, and what it integrates with. That's what a real quote is built from. See our full cost framework for how we scope and quote projects.