It is the first question in almost every meeting we have, and it is also the one our industry answers worst: how much does a mobile app cost?
The honest answer fits in one sentence: between 5,000 euros for a first testable version and over 150,000 euros for a complex application, with a median around 30,000 euros on projects actually commissioned in France (La Fabrique du Net).
That range is too wide to be useful as it stands. Here is how to narrow it.
Price ranges by app type
Price does not depend on the number of screens. It depends on the number of business rules and the depth of integration with your existing systems.
| App type | 2026 range |
|---|---|
| Simple / brochure | €8,000 – €20,000 |
| MVP, working prototype | €10,000 – €40,000 |
| Business app (e-commerce, booking) | €25,000 – €80,000 |
| Complex (marketplace, real-time, social) | €80,000 – €150,000 + |
These orders of magnitude are consistent across French market sources (EID Lab, Yeeply).
The most expensive jump is not visual, it is invisible: it is going from an app that displays data to an app that changes it. The moment you add user accounts, payment, synchronisation or access rights, you move up a budget bracket.
Native or hybrid: the decision that weighs most
This is the choice with the biggest impact on your bill.
Native means building two separate applications, one for iOS and one for Android. Performance is maximal, but you double the work: budget 27,000 to 135,000 euros per platform.
Hybrid uses a single codebase for both systems. The bill drops by 30 to 50% (KBCOM).
Native is justified for games, augmented reality, heavy video processing or advanced hardware access. For a business app — ordering, booking, tracking, management — hybrid is the right call in the vast majority of cases, and the quality gap perceived by users is now negligible.
The cost nobody budgets: maintenance
This is the line missing from most business plans we are shown.
A mobile app is not a website you can leave running for three years untouched. iOS and Android each ship a major version every year, store rules change, and an unmaintained app eventually gets rejected or pulled.
The budget to plan: 15 to 20% of the initial investment, every year. On a 40,000 euro app, that is 6,000 to 8,000 euros annually.
An agency that does not mention maintenance in its quote has not given you the price of your app. It has given you the price of its delivery.
Why two quotes can differ fourfold
You describe the same project to four suppliers and get back €12,000, €28,000, €45,000 and €90,000. It is not necessarily that three of them are dishonest.
The gap almost always comes from what is not written down:
- The back-office. Who administers content, users, orders? An admin interface is often 30% of the project.
- Testing. On how many real devices, across how many scenarios?
- Publication. Developer accounts, store listings, GDPR compliance, handling Apple rejections.
- Data migration from your existing system.
- How many rounds of revisions are included before each change becomes billable.
Before comparing totals, compare scopes. Ask each supplier what their quote does not cover: the answer is more revealing than the number.
Start smaller than you think
The natural reflex is to list every feature you want and ask what it costs. That is the surest way to pay a lot for functions nobody will use.
An MVP between 10,000 and 40,000 euros puts the app in real users’ hands within weeks. You then discover what gets used, what gets ignored, and what was missing that nobody had asked for.
The rule is simple: observed usage is cheaper to correct than assumed usage.
It is the same budget-framing logic we apply to web projects, set out in our article on what a professional website costs.
Our approach
At DIGABLO, we frame the budget before writing a line of code:
- A scoping workshop to separate what is essential at launch from what can wait.
- A written scope, stating what is included and above all what is not.
- Hybrid by default, native only when your use case genuinely justifies it.
- Maintenance priced in the quote, not discovered six months after delivery.
- Intermediate deliveries, so you see the app running before the budget runs out.
Have an app project and need a reliable order of magnitude? Let’s talk about your project: we will give you a reasoned range, even if the answer is that you do not need an app.