How much does it cost to design an app in 2026?

We design mobile apps for a living, so we're not neutral. Where we use our own numbers, they're the ones on our pricing page, and where we use real projects, they're case studies you can open on our site. Every other figure here comes from the company that published it, linked, and read on 2 November 2026.

The short answer

Across the four guides that rank for this search (compared in the next section):

• A simple app (a handful of core flows, standard patterns) is put at about $3,000 to $10,000 to design.
• A medium app (accounts, payments or bookings, several user roles, a basic design system) at about $8,000 to $40,000.
• A complex app (many roles, dashboards, heavy integrations, custom motion) from about $20,000, and past $100,000 at the top end.
• Hourly rates run from about $25 in India and Central and Eastern Europe to $150 in the US and Canada, by Cleveroad's figures.
• Monthly design plans exist too. Ours start from $2,000 a month; at Ramotion, full-time embedded support is $16,800 a month.
• Design is a slice of the total. The build usually costs several times more, and the stores charge their own fees: $99 a year for Apple, $25 once for Google.

What the guides on page one say

If you've already searched this, you've seen a lot of different numbers. Here they are side by side, from the guides that rank for it right now.

Sources: Cleveroad, Shakuro, SolveIt, Appinventiv, read 2 November 2026.

Two things are worth knowing before you lean on any of these. First, all four are agencies, and none of them cites data for its ranges; they're each studio's sense of its own market. Second, they agree more than they look like they do. Strip out the edges and almost everyone puts a simple app around $5,000 and a medium app somewhere from about $10,000 to $40,000. Where they split is the top end, because "complex" means anything from a marketplace to a hospital system.

So treat the table as a sense check, not a quote. The rest of this guide is about working out where your own app sits.

What you're actually paying for

An app design fee pays for decisions more than pictures. The screens are the visible part; most of the hours go into working out what the screens should be, and what happens on each one when something goes wrong.

Here's what a full design engagement covers. For where the time goes, Cleveroad publishes estimates for its first three stages: research 40 to 80 hours, wireframes 60 to 100 hours, and prototyping 80 to 160 hours (Cleveroad, read 2 November 2026). Our own published durations are in brackets below.

1. Understand the job. Who opens the app, where they are, and what they need in the first thirty seconds. (Ours: usually two to three days.)
2. Map the flows and wireframe them. Every path through the app, including the unhappy ones: the failed payment, the expired link, the empty list on day one. This is the cheapest place to change your mind, and the most underrated. (Ours: flows and a first prototype take about two weeks.)
3. Visual design. The look, the type, the colour, the components, applied to every screen.
4. States. Each screen drawn loading, empty, full, with an error and offline. As Shakuro puts it, a login screen is simple until you add password recovery and two-factor codes.
5. Prototype and testing. A clickable version you can put in front of five users and an investor in the same week, then tested on real phones, not a laptop simulator.
6. The handoff. A design system with named layers, real components and documented tokens, so developers build what was drawn and the next designer doesn't start again.
7. Store assets. Icon, screenshots and preview images for the App Store and Google Play listings.

For Fiteats, an AI meal planner, we worked through 74 wireframes before a single screen was styled, then finished 48 screens in 30 days. A quote that only counts the final screens is pricing the smallest part of the job, which is how cheap quotes turn into expensive change requests. You can see the full flow in the Fiteats case study.

App design cost by size, with real projects

Ranges are easier to trust when you can see a project behind them. These are four apps we designed, with the scope and timeline their case studies publish. We don't publish what each client paid, so read them for scope, and use the ranges above for price.

The dollar bands below are the guides' bands from the table above, not what these clients paid. The projects show what that size of app looks like.

A simple app looks like Fiteats in shape: one main user, a clear core loop (plan the week, eat the day, shop the list), standard patterns and one mobile app. What keeps an app this size near the bottom of the ranges is a scope that's written down before work starts.

A medium app looks like Betr or Speak. Betr started as a brief to redesign the home screen and became a rethink of the whole app, with check-ins, journals, an AI companion and a "Life Map" that reads the user's own words back to them. Speak had two users on the same phone, a child who practises and a parent who checks progress, and it shipped on iOS and Android. Betr ended at 265 screens and Speak at 130, over three and four months, which shows how far screen counts run once every state is drawn, even in a redesign of one app.

A complex app looks like Metabolix: a patient app on iOS and Android, a clinic web app for monitoring, prescribing and stock, and devices that sync readings between them. More than 330 screens went to its developers. Posh Celebration, a marketplace for planning events, went past 220 screens across desktop and mobile. Apps like these sit in the guides' complex band, where the range stops meaning much, because the number of roles, platforms and integrations sets the price, not the app category.

The seven things that move the price

Most guides put complexity at or near the top, which is true and not very useful. Here's what complexity actually means when someone writes your quote.

1. Screens, flows and states. The biggest single driver. Count the flows (sign up, onboarding, the core task, settings, payments) and then the states inside each. Shakuro makes the same point plainly: an estimate built on screens alone misses where the hours go.

2. One platform or two. Cleveroad puts designing for iOS and Android together at 15 to 30% more than one platform. We design both from one design system, so each app keeps its own conventions without being designed twice. You can ship one first and the other later, and it changes the price.

3. Whether a design system exists. A redesign of an app with a clean component library costs less than one where every screen is a one-off. If the old files are missing, the designer is rebuilding from screenshots.

4. Custom visuals and motion. Illustration, custom icon sets and animated transitions all take hours. Cleveroad prices "advanced features (AI, AR, complex animations)" at $20,000 and up on their own. Speak needed a reward system with badges, levels and a vending-machine shop for points, and every one of those is screens to draw.

5. Integrations and edge cases. Payments, maps, health devices, third-party logins. Each one adds screens for the moment it fails. Metabolix had to work for a patient with one device or five, alone, with nobody to call about pairing a scale.

6. The brand. If the app has no logo, colours or type yet, someone has to make them first. That's a brand project before it's an app project.

7. Whether the same team builds it. When design and build sit in one team, a screen that's expensive to build gets simplified while it's still a drawing. When they're separate, that discovery happens in week six of development, and you pay for it twice.

Who designs it, and what each option costs

You have four ways to get an app designed. The price per hour is only part of the comparison. The bigger difference is how much of the coordination lands on you.

Sources: Usarion pricing, Ramotion, Eleken pricing, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, read 2 November 2026.

Freelancers are the cheapest per hour and the hardest to scale. One good designer can do a simple app very well. A medium app with research, a design system and two platforms usually needs more than one pair of hands, and you become the project manager.

Agencies cost more per hour and less in your time. The price range is huge. At the top end, Ramotion publishes a $35,000 fixed-price discovery sprint and a milestone product redesign (complete overhauls and new multi-platform launches, in its words) at $50,000 to $150,000+, and says plainly that the $50,000 floor applies to early-stage startups too. Other studios, us included, start much lower. What you should expect from any of them is a written scope and a fixed price against it.

Design subscriptions are the option none of the four guides above mention, and for a lot of founders they're the best fit. You pay a monthly fee for a set block of senior design time, and the work follows your roadmap instead of a contract. Our plans start from $2,000 a month for 40 hours with one senior designer, $3,500 for 80 hours, and $8,000 for two senior designers and 200 hours, with design and build in the same hours and pause or cancel any month. Eleken, a SaaS design studio, publishes $4,599 a month for a part-time designer, $6,599 for full-time and $11,999 for two, with a two-month minimum. Ramotion's embedded support is $9,500 a month part-time and $16,800 full-time.

An in-house designer is the most expensive way to design one app and the cheapest way to design ten years of one. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for web and digital interface designers at $104,000 a year in May 2025. Divided over a standard 2,080-hour year, that's about $50 an hour in pay alone, before benefits, a laptop, software and the months it takes to hire.

Hourly, fixed price or monthly: which model fits

The pricing model matters as much as the price, because it decides who carries the risk when the plan changes. And with apps, the plan always changes.

Hourly is honest about effort and puts all the risk on you. It suits small, well-defined jobs: an audit, a few extra screens, a store listing.

Fixed price puts the risk on the designer. You agree a written scope, you get one number, and it only moves if you change what you asked for. That's how we quote app projects, and it's the model to ask for when you have a clear brief and a launch date. The catch is that the scope has to be real. If it's vague, a careful studio will price the vagueness in.

Monthly suits products that are still moving. If you're going to learn something from users every two weeks and change direction, a subscription costs less than a series of change requests on a fixed contract. It also makes the cost easy to compare: our Basic plan works out at $50 an hour of senior time, Growth at about $44 and Enterprise at $40, by our own division of the published plans.

Our rule of thumb: fixed price when you know exactly what you need, monthly when the roadmap is still shifting.

How to estimate your own app design budget

You don't need a calculator website for this. You need a list.

1. Write down every flow. Sign up, onboarding, the main task, search, payments, settings, notifications, admin. One line each.
2. Count the screens in each flow, then add their states. Empty, loading, error and success screens are easy to forget and always needed.
3. Mark the hard parts. Anything with a payment, a device, a map, a chat, a feed or a second user role.
4. Decide the platforms. iOS only, Android only, both, or both plus a web app.
5. Note what exists already. A brand, a design system, wireframes, an old app.
6. Then do the sum. Total design hours times the hourly rate.

Here's how the sum plays out on Shakuro's medium app of about 200 hours. At Cleveroad's US and Canada rate of $100 to $150 an hour, it's $20,000 to $30,000. At its Western Europe rate of $50 to $99, it's $10,000 to about $19,800. At its Central and Eastern Europe and India rate of $25 to $49, it's $5,000 to $9,800. Same app, three very different invoices, which is most of the spread you see in the guides.

The list in steps one to five is also the best thing you can send an agency. A clear list gets you a tighter fixed price, because nobody has to guess.

Costs that come after the design

The design fee isn't the last bill, and some of the next ones are fixed.

Development. The build usually costs several times more than the design. Purrweb recommends putting about 30 to 35% of the development cost into design. Blue Label Labs says a full app, from discovery to the store, averages about $120,000 for one platform, and that discovery, planning and design take about four to six weeks of a typical four to five month project. If your design budget is $10,000 and your build budget is nothing, the design will sit in Figma.

Store fees. The Apple Developer Program is $99 a year. It's what lets you distribute on the App Store, and it includes TestFlight, which lets you invite up to 10,000 external testers to a beta. Google Play charges a one-time $25 registration fee.

Store assets. Screenshots and preview images for each listing, in the sizes each store asks for. Cheap if they're in the design scope, annoying if they aren't.

Design after launch. Every new feature needs screens, and every new OS version shifts a few conventions. Teams that ship monthly usually keep some design time on a plan rather than starting a new project each time.

How much does it cost to redesign an app?

Usually less than the first design, sometimes not. Appinventiv puts redesigns at $2,000 to $15,000. That's fair for a visual refresh of an app whose flows already work. It isn't for a rethink.

Betr is a good example of the difference. The brief was to redesign the home screen. The real problem was that tracking, journaling, goals and analysis each lived behind their own tab, five features side by side rather than one habit, so the redesign became the whole app. Three months, brief to handover. You can read how that happened in the Betr case study.

A redesign costs less when the design files exist, the flows mostly work, and you're fixing the screens where people drop out. It costs as much as a new design when the old files are gone, the iOS and Android versions have drifted apart, or the app's whole idea is changing. The cheapest first step is an audit: find where people leave, rework those paths first, and keep what already works.

How long app design takes

For most apps, four to eight weeks. On our projects, understanding the job takes two to three days, flows and a first prototype another two weeks, and the rest is visual design, device testing and store preparation. Ask any team to show you real screens in the first week.

Smaller apps can go faster. Fiteats went from idea to 48 finished screens in 30 days. Larger ones take longer: Betr took three months and Speak four, in two rounds. A healthcare platform with a patient app and a clinic dashboard runs past that. Time and money track each other closely, so if a quote's timeline looks very short for your list of flows, ask what's been left out.

Ways to spend less without getting a worse app

Design the MVP, not the roadmap. The first version needs the core loop and nothing else. Every feature you postpone is a flow, its states and its edge cases you don't pay for yet. Our guide to MVP design walks through how to cut a first version down.

Wireframe before you style. A change to a grey box costs minutes. A change to a finished screen, its states and its prototype costs days.

Use one design system for both platforms. Native conventions for each, one set of components underneath. It keeps the second platform from turning into a second design.

Write the scope down. A written scope turns a range into a number, and stops scope from creeping in the middle.

Keep design and build close. The same team, or at least weekly reviews between them, so expensive screens get simplified before anyone codes them.

Don't buy the cheapest hour. A low rate that needs twice the hours and a redesign a year later isn't cheap. Look at shipped apps, not concepts, before you compare rates.

What a good app design quote includes

When the quotes come in, put them side by side and check for these. A quote that's missing several is cheaper because it's smaller, not because it's better value.

• The flows and screens covered, by name.
• Which states are included (empty, loading, error, offline).
• The platforms, and whether both are designed from one system.
• How many rounds of changes are included, and what happens after.
• Whether a clickable prototype and user testing are in scope.
• What you get at handoff: source files, a component library, documentation, a walkthrough.
• Store assets, or not.
• Who owns the work. You should own everything you've paid for.
• The timeline, with what you'll see in week one.
• Whether the same team can build it, and what that costs.

If you're comparing studios rather than quotes, our list of mobile app design agencies puts ten of them side by side with the prices they publish.

FAQ

If you've got a list of flows, or even a rough idea, book a call and bring it. We'll tell you which size of app you're looking at, whether a fixed price or a monthly plan fits it better, and what our mobile app design work would cover.