What an App Actually Costs (Real Numbers From 8 Shipped Apps)
2026-09-01 · 5 min
Search "app development cost" and you get quotes from agencies: 30,000 to 300,000 euros, depending who's asking. Those numbers describe a studio billing hours across a team. They don't describe what it actually costs one person, working with AI tools, to build and ship an app.
I've shipped 8 apps this way since August. Here's the real breakdown.
0
contractors hired
€0/mo
software stack
The monthly stack
This runs every app I have live, not per app:
| Cost | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Supabase (Pro tier) | Database, auth, storage for every app |
| Vercel (Pro tier) | Hosting for the web apps and this site |
| Claude subscription | Where most of the actual building happens |
| Resend | Transactional email, still on the free tier |
That's the whole recurring software bill. No design tool subscription, no project management tool, no separate CI service. One person doesn't need them.
The one-time and per-app costs
Two fees are fixed no matter what you build:
- Apple Developer Program: 99 EUR a year, required to publish anything on the App Store.
- Google Play Console: 25 EUR, once, ever. Cheapest gate in the industry.
On top of that, being self-employed in Spain adds the : it starts in the low 80s EUR a month under the new-business flat rate, then climbs based on real income. That's a cost of doing business, not of building an app, but it's real money going out before a single user shows up.
Why BibleNow costs more than the rest
Not every app costs the same to run. BibleNow generates audio Bible readings, and audio generation isn't free: the cost scales with how much gets generated and how many people are listening. A note-taking app or a card game doesn't have that meter running. An app that generates AI audio, images, or long text on every use does, and that difference matters more than anything else on this list when you're estimating what your own idea will cost.
If your app idea involves generating audio, video, or images per user request, budget for that separately. It's usage-based, not a flat monthly fee, and it's the line item most cost estimates get wrong.
What about my time?
I didn't track hours with a stopwatch, so I won't pretend to give you a fake-precise number. Honestly: building an app end to end (design, code, App Store review, the first round of bug fixes) has taken me anywhere from a long weekend to a few weeks, depending on how much the app actually does. AI handles a lot of the code I'd have typed by hand a few years ago. It doesn't replace deciding what to build or noticing when something feels wrong to use, and that part still takes as long as it always did.
What would yours cost?
Pick the shape that's closest to your idea:
Estimated build time
1–2 weeks
A few features, real backend, accounts
Estimated monthly cost
≈€60/mo
Plus one-time store fees: €99/yr Apple, €25 once Google.
The actual takeaway
An agency quote isn't wrong, it's pricing a different thing: a team, project management, guaranteed hours. If you're a solo founder or a small team trying to get a real app in front of real users without that overhead, the honest cost is closer to what's above: a stack of subscriptions you'd probably already pay for other things, two store fees, and someone who can do design, code, and product thinking without three separate hires.
That's what I do. If you've got an app idea and want a straight answer on what it would actually take, let's talk.
Building something?
Work with me