About this calculator
app-development-cost.com publishes one thing: an honest, US-market estimate of what it costs to build software. No lead gate, no invented precision, and no offshore rate card hiding inside a US-sounding number.
Why this exists
Almost every published app cost calculator does the same thing: multiply a base figure by a handful of coefficients, then round to something memorable. The output looks precise and means very little. Worse, most quote 2,000 hours at $30 to $50 an hour — an offshore rate card presented without saying so — which makes a US budget look wildly wrong when the real quotes arrive.
This calculator does the opposite. It accumulates engineering hours across independent axes, applies multipliers only where something genuinely scales, and converts to dollars last at $98–$180 per hour depending on the discipline doing the work. Then it shows you the arithmetic.
How it is built
The estimator is a pure function: the same answers always produce the same output, with no dates, no randomness and no server round-trip. That is what makes an estimate shareable by URL and testable in continuous integration.
Every rate, multiplier, threshold and percentage lives in one configuration layer. Nothing under the interface hard-codes a dollar amount, which is why the methodology page can render the real model rather than a description of it — that page reads the same file the calculator runs on, so the published methodology cannot drift from the maths.
How it is tested
A test suite runs five reference scenarios — a simple MVP, an e-commerce build, a HIPAA healthcare platform, a fintech app and an enterprise SaaS product — plus more than forty invariants the model must never violate. Among them:
- A second platform must cost more than one, and must never double the total.
- Cross-platform must be cheaper than two native builds and dearer than one.
- Every axis must move the number. A control that changes nothing is the specific failure this whole model exists to avoid.
- Cost must rise monotonically with complexity, and the timeline must never shorten as work grows.
- The itemised lines must reconcile with the headline figure.
- A shared estimate must survive the URL round trip exactly.
Each scenario is also pinned to a band drawn from published US agency pricing — an MVP between $55K and $110K, an enterprise SaaS platform between $1.2M and $2.2M. If someone changes a rate or an hour figure in a way that would quietly reprice the whole site, the build fails loudly instead.
What it deliberately does not do
- Ask for your email before showing the result. The full estimate is free and stays on a shareable link.
- Offer a currency or region selector. It quotes one market — the US — because comparing a US hour with an offshore hour is the mistake this site exists to prevent.
- Report a single exact figure. Ranges are rounded by magnitude so the output never implies precision it does not have.
- Track you. No analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests from the browser — the typeface is self-hosted.
- Pretend to be a quote. Final development cost depends on finalised technical requirements.
Rates
Published US band $98–$180 per hour. Senior US engineers, US project management, US QA. No offshore blend. The blended rate on your result page is an output of your work mix rather than an input, which is why a compliance-heavy build genuinely costs more per hour than a simple one.
Tell us it is wrong
If a figure looks off for work you have actually delivered or commissioned, we want to know. The hour figures come from delivery experience on comparable US builds, and experience is exactly the kind of thing that should be corrected by more of it. Write to hello@app-development-cost.com and tell us which number and why.