If you've searched for the cost of custom software, you've probably found two kinds of answers: "it depends," or a single number so wide it's useless ("$10,000 to $1,000,000"). Neither helps you plan a budget or decide whether a project is worth pursuing.
This guide gives you something more practical. Below you'll find realistic ranges for the most common project types we build, an honest breakdown of what actually moves the price up or down, and the costs most people forget to budget for. By the end, you should be able to walk into a conversation with any development firm and know whether the quote you're getting is reasonable.
The short answer
For a professionally built product delivered by an experienced team, here's where most projects land in 2026:
| Project type | Typical range | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Simple MVP or internal tool | $25,000 to $75,000 | 6 to 12 weeks |
| Mid-complexity web application | $75,000 to $250,000 | 3 to 6 months |
| Mobile app (iOS + Android) | $60,000 to $300,000 | 3 to 8 months |
| AI feature added to existing software | $30,000 to $150,000 | 6 to 16 weeks |
| Enterprise platform or system replacement | $250,000 to $1,500,000+ | 6 to 18 months |
| Indie or small-studio game | $50,000 to $500,000 | 4 to 18 months |
| Mid-size commercial game | $500,000 to $5,000,000+ | 12 to 36 months |
These numbers assume a US-based or blended team with senior oversight. They are not the cheapest numbers you can find online. They are the numbers at which projects tend to actually ship, work, and not need to be rebuilt a year later.
What actually drives the cost
Every quote is essentially hours multiplied by rate, plus risk. Understanding the inputs helps you control the output.
1. Scope and feature count
This is the biggest lever. A product with user accounts, a dashboard, and one core workflow is a fundamentally different project from one that also has payments, notifications, an admin panel, reporting, and role-based permissions. Each feature adds design, development, testing, and maintenance surface area.
A useful exercise before talking to any vendor: write down every feature you want, then mark each one as "must have for launch" or "nice to have later." The must-have list is what you should price first.
2. Complexity, not just size
Two features can take the same amount of screen space and differ 10x in effort. A "search" box that filters a list is a few hours. A search that ranks results by relevance, handles typos, and works across millions of records is a project in itself. Real-time collaboration, offline sync, complex scheduling logic, and anything involving money or regulated data all sit at the expensive end.
3. Integrations
Almost every modern product connects to other systems: payment processors, CRMs, ERPs, accounting software, shipping providers, identity providers, or legacy internal databases. Each integration costs time to build and, more importantly, to test against a system you don't control. Integrations with well-documented, modern APIs (Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce) are predictable. Integrations with a 15-year-old internal system with no documentation are where budgets go to die.
4. Platforms
Web only is the cheapest. Adding native iOS and Android roughly doubles the front-end work unless you use a cross-platform framework, which reduces the multiplier but adds its own tradeoffs. Games add another layer: console certification, controller support, and platform-specific optimization are significant line items.
5. Design and user experience
A functional interface built from a standard component library is inexpensive. A custom, branded, polished experience with animation, accessibility compliance, and multiple user-tested iterations is not. For consumer-facing products, design quality directly affects adoption, so this is rarely a place to cut. For internal tools, a clean standard UI is often the right call.
6. Compliance and security requirements
HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, FedRAMP, and similar requirements add architecture decisions, audit logging, encryption requirements, documentation, and testing. Expect compliance-heavy projects to cost 20 to 40% more than an equivalent unregulated product.
7. Who is building it
Rates vary enormously by geography and seniority:
- Freelance generalists: $40 to $100/hour
- Offshore agencies: $30 to $80/hour
- Nearshore agencies (Latin America, Eastern Europe): $50 to $120/hour
- US/Western Europe boutique firms: $120 to $250/hour
- Large consultancies: $200 to $400+/hour
Rate alone is misleading. A senior engineer at $180/hour who ships a feature correctly in 10 hours is cheaper than a junior at $60/hour who takes 40 hours and introduces two bugs. What you're paying for is throughput and reduced rework, not just time.
Cost ranges by project type
Simple MVP or internal tool: $25,000 to $75,000
A focused product with one primary workflow, basic authentication, a database, and a straightforward interface. Examples: an internal inventory tracker, a customer portal that shows order status, a booking tool for a single service, or a first-version SaaS product with one core feature.
What keeps it in this range: a small, well-defined feature set, standard design components, and no complex integrations.
Mid-complexity web application: $75,000 to $250,000
Multiple user roles, several interconnected workflows, third-party integrations, reporting, and a custom-designed interface. Most B2B SaaS products, marketplaces, and customer-facing platforms live here.
What pushes it toward the upper end: payments, multi-tenancy, real-time features, complex permissions, or a large data model.
Mobile app (iOS and Android): $60,000 to $300,000
A cross-platform app with a backend, push notifications, and app store deployment starts around $60,000 for something simple. Native apps on both platforms with rich UI, offline support, device integrations (camera, location, Bluetooth), and a robust backend can reach $300,000 or more.
Don't forget the backend. Many people budget for "the app" and forget that the app needs an API, a database, and infrastructure behind it, which is often half the cost.
AI feature added to existing software: $30,000 to $150,000
Adding an AI capability to a product you already have is now one of the most common requests we see. A well-scoped feature (document summarization, natural-language search over your data, a support assistant grounded in your knowledge base, or a recommendation model) typically runs $30,000 to $80,000.
Costs climb when the feature needs custom model training, strict accuracy requirements, heavy data cleanup, or on-premise deployment for privacy reasons. Budget separately for ongoing inference costs, which scale with usage. (We cover this in depth in our guide to adding AI to existing software.)
Enterprise platform or system replacement: $250,000 to $1,500,000+
Replacing a legacy system, building a company-wide operations platform, or consolidating several disconnected tools into one. These projects involve deep discovery, data migration, integrations with multiple existing systems, extensive testing, change management, and phased rollouts.
The wide range reflects reality: a departmental system for 50 users is very different from a global platform for 5,000. Large enterprise builds almost always run in phases, with each phase separately scoped and priced.
Games: $50,000 to several million
Game budgets vary more than any other category. A polished 2D mobile or indie PC game with a small scope can be built for $50,000 to $200,000. A 3D game with custom art, multiple levels, multiplayer, and console releases moves into the $500,000 to $5,000,000 range. Art and content production, not engineering, is usually the largest cost driver.
If you're a non-gaming company building a serious game, training simulation, or gamified experience, expect costs closer to the mid-complexity app range, plus art.
In-house vs. agency vs. offshore: the real comparison
Hiring in-house feels cheaper on paper. Here's the honest math for a small product team (one senior engineer, one mid-level engineer, one designer) in the US:
- Salaries: roughly $450,000 to $550,000 per year
- Benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, software: add 25 to 35%
- Recruiting: $30,000 to $60,000 per hire through an agency, plus 2 to 4 months of ramp-up
- Management overhead: someone has to run the team
Total: $600,000 to $750,000 per year, with 3 to 6 months before the team is productive. That makes sense if you have years of continuous development ahead. It rarely makes sense for a single project.
Agencies cost more per hour but you pay only for the hours you need, get a team that's already working well together, and can scale up or down. Offshore teams offer the lowest hourly rates, with tradeoffs in time-zone overlap, communication, and often a need for more hands-on management from your side.
Many companies land on a hybrid: an agency builds the product, then trains an in-house team or a smaller retainer arrangement to maintain it.
The hidden costs almost everyone forgets
The build cost is the number people focus on. These are the ones that show up later:
Ongoing maintenance: 15 to 25% of the build cost per year. Dependencies need updating, operating systems change, app stores change their rules, security patches need applying, and small bugs surface with real usage. Software that isn't maintained decays.
Cloud infrastructure: $200 to $20,000+ per month. A small app might run on a few hundred dollars a month. A platform with heavy traffic, large data storage, or AI inference can reach five figures monthly. Ask for an infrastructure estimate as part of any proposal.
Third-party services. Payment processing fees, email delivery, SMS, maps, AI model APIs, monitoring tools, and analytics all have usage-based pricing.
App store fees. Apple takes 15 to 30% of in-app revenue, Google similar, plus annual developer accounts.
Compliance audits. SOC 2 or HIPAA compliance involves ongoing audits and documentation, not a one-time checkbox.
Rebuilds from cutting corners. The most expensive software is software built cheaply twice. A surprising share of our projects begin with a product that was built quickly by the lowest bidder and now can't scale, can't be extended, or has security problems that were never addressed.
How to get an accurate quote
Vague inputs produce vague quotes. To get a number you can rely on:
- Write a one-page brief. Who the users are, what problem the software solves, and the core workflow from start to finish.
- List features and prioritize them. Must-have for launch versus later.
- Identify integrations. Every external system the software must talk to.
- State constraints. Platforms, compliance requirements, deadlines, and existing systems it must fit into.
- Ask for a discovery phase. For anything beyond a simple project, a paid discovery phase (typically $5,000 to $25,000 over 2 to 4 weeks) produces a detailed scope, architecture, and a fixed or tightly ranged estimate. It is far cheaper than discovering scope problems mid-build.
- Compare quotes on the same scope. If one vendor quotes $60,000 and another $180,000 for what sounds like the same project, they are almost certainly not quoting the same thing. Ask what's excluded.
A good firm will tell you where the uncertainty lies in their estimate and how they'll manage it. A firm that gives you a confident fixed price for a complex project with no discovery is guessing.
Frequently asked questions
Why do estimates vary so much between vendors?
Is fixed-price or time-and-materials better?
Can I reduce cost by starting with an MVP?
How much should I set aside for after launch?
Do no-code or low-code tools change this math?
Getting a real number for your project
Every range in this guide is a starting point. Your actual cost depends on the specifics of your product, your users, and the systems you already have in place.
If you'd like a realistic estimate for your project, we're happy to talk through your requirements and give you a candid assessment, including whether custom development is the right choice at all. Contact us to schedule a free scoping call.