The honest answer to “how much does an app cost?” is “it depends on scope”, and that answer helps nobody decide anything. Below are our own price ranges, what moves them, and what to ask when you compare quotes. These are Studio Nørd’s 2026 prices; they will not line up one-to-one with every offer on the market, but they show what each part of the work costs.
Short answer: four jobs, four prices
App projects are usually quoted as a single line, but there are separate jobs inside:
| Job | What it covers | Timeline | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Stakeholder interviews, market and competitor scan, technical constraints, a one-page product brief | 2–4 weeks | €4–10K |
| Design + design system | Research, information architecture, UX and prototype, iOS and Android interfaces, component library, build-ready handoff. No build. | 6–10 weeks | €15–35K |
| MVP | Design and build together: the first version coded (Swift, Kotlin or React Native) and live in the stores | 3–5 months | €27–65K |
| Full product | A mature product with integrations, an admin panel, several roles and platforms; usually co-built with your team | 6–12 months | €70–180K |
What drives the price?
1. Platforms
iOS only, Android only, or both. Designing both at once does not double the work, because flows and architecture are shared, but each platform has its own components, navigation patterns and guidelines. Tablet, Apple Watch or Wear OS come on top.
2. Flows, more than screens
What grows a budget is less the number of screens than the number of flows. Sign-up, payment, identity checks, notification settings: every flow has empty, error and loading states and edge cases, and each one is designed. It is one reason banking and insurance apps cost more — the same screen can have ten states.
3. How deep the research goes
User interviews, prototype tests and a look at the current product’s analytics take up much of a discovery budget. Skipping it looks like a saving at first; redesigning screens later usually costs more.
4. A design system
Drawing one-off screens and building a design system with tokens, components and documentation are different jobs. If the app will live on several platforms or carry several brands, the system adds a little to the first release and takes cost out of every one after it. More on our design systems page.
5. Regulation and security
In finance, health or insurance, accessibility, consent copy, GDPR and internal sign-off are part of the design. Known up front, they land in the budget; found late, they stretch the schedule.
6. Who builds it?
If you have your own engineering team, we deliver the design and the design system and review build quality against the system as it goes. If not, we can build the first version ourselves and hand the codebase over later. The second route costs more, but there is one team accountable.
Why quotes vary so much
You will see everything from freelance MVPs for a couple of thousand euros to products in the hundreds of thousands. Most of the gap is not the same work priced differently; it is different work sold under the same name. An app assembled on a template and a product that starts with research and ships with a design system are both called “app design”. When you compare quotes, ask:
- Are user research and testing included?
- Are iOS and Android designed separately, or is one design adapted to both?
- Does the handoff include a component library and documentation, or only screens?
- Will the designers be available to the engineers during the build?
- What metric will the app’s success be measured by?
Sensible ways to bring the budget down
- Cut scope, not quality. Focusing the first release on the two or three flows that matter most is cheaper than doing everything halfway.
- Start with discovery. A discovery phase of 2–4 weeks settles scope and budget before you commit to the whole project.
- Use the team you have. With an in-house team, buying the design and the system and building internally costs much less than an MVP or full product with us.
How quoting works
In the first conversation we talk through the product, the goals and the constraints. Then we share a fixed-scope quote. We do not do free pitch work or speculative design.
The service itself is described on mobile app design & development, and the research and interface side on UX / UI design. If you want to talk about your project, write to us with the form below.
