Pick what you're building. You'll get four honest cost paths — agency, freelancer, offshore team, and doing it yourself with an AI app builder — plus a realistic timeline for each.
Every feature you tick adds an hour estimate drawn from typical mobile build effort. Those hours are scaled by your platform count, then by design complexity and compliance overhead — both damped, because design mostly affects the UI layer and compliance mostly affects process, so neither applies at full strength to the whole build. Quality assurance, project management and store submission are added as a 30% overhead on top of raw build hours, because they always happen and are always forgotten in first estimates. Timelines assume larger projects get larger teams, so elapsed weeks do not scale linearly with hours.
| Path | Blended rate | What you're paying for |
|---|---|---|
| US / Western Europe agency | $120–190/hr | Full team, project management, contract, accountability, and someone to sue |
| US / Western Europe freelancer | $65–115/hr | One or two people, less overhead, more key-person risk |
| Offshore agency or freelancer | $25–55/hr | Lower rate, higher coordination cost, timezone and spec-clarity risk |
| DIY with an AI app builder | Subscription only | Your own time instead of money. Works well for prototypes and simple apps, struggles as complexity rises |
The DIY figure assumes 2–8 months of subscription depending on scope, and assumes you do the work. It is not a like-for-like swap for a professional build — see the honest caveat in the results panel.