What an app costs to build and to keep in the stores

Ask what an app costs in India and the honest answer starts with a question back: does it need a backend built, or does it talk to a system you already run. That single fact moves the number more than platform, screen count or design put together.

The bands

₹1.5 lakh to ₹4 lakh. A focused app on a backend that already exists — your website's API, or a system you already run. A handful of screens, one clear job. Six to ten weeks.

₹4 lakh to ₹12 lakh. A full app with the backend built alongside it. Both platforms, logins, and usually payments or notifications. Three to five months, and most of that time is the server, not the screens.

₹12 lakh to ₹30 lakh. Chat, maps, several kinds of user, an admin panel to run the thing day to day. Five to nine months.

Above that. You are not commissioning an app any more. You are running a product, and it needs a team that stays rather than a project that ends.

The cost calculator will place you in one of these bands from five questions, if you would rather answer those than read the reasoning.

What actually moves you between bands

Not platform count. A cross-platform build keeps Android and iOS close to the cost of one, and there is rarely a good reason to pay for two native builds for a small business app.

Whether the backend exists. This is the one that surprises people. The screens, the navigation, the design — that is often the smaller half of the work. The server that holds accounts, processes orders and keeps everything in sync is the larger half, and it is invisible in a demo.

Login and payments. Both bring rules you did not write. A payment gateway has its own integration and its own review. A login means password resets, sessions, and what happens when someone loses their phone.

Offline use. If the app has to work without a signal — for field staff, deliveries, anywhere connectivity is unreliable — that is not a checkbox. It is a second version of the data logic, because now two copies can disagree and something has to decide which one is right.

How many kinds of user see different things. A customer app and a staff app inside one product multiply the screens and the permissions. They do not just double them.

The cost that is not in the build quote

Two platforms mean two sets of ongoing rules. Apple charges $99 a year to keep an app listed. Google charges $25 once. Both review every release, and a rejection costs days rather than hours, because you are waiting on someone else's queue.

Both platforms also push a major operating system update every year, and an app nobody updates for it eventually breaks — quietly, and you usually hear about it from a customer before you see it yourself. Budget the backend's hosting too: roughly ₹3,000 to ₹20,000 a month for most small-business apps, rising with how much data moves through it.

None of this is optional maintenance you can skip if the budget is tight. It is the price of staying in the stores at all.

Where this goes wrong

The estimate that gets a business into trouble is the one built from the screens alone — a designer's mockup priced as if the app were the whole job, with the backend added later as a surprise. Whether you need an app at all is worth settling first: most businesses that ask for one actually want to be on a customer's phone, and a fast website does that for a fraction of this cost, with no store review and no yearly rebuild.

If the answer is genuinely yes — people will open this repeatedly, by choice, for something a browser cannot do properly — then price the backend as carefully as the screens, because that is where the real number lives, and where most quotes go quietly wrong.

Before you sign anything

Ask what happens to the backend if you want to change developer later. If the answer is "we would need to rebuild it," that is not a technical detail. It is the actual cost of leaving, and it belongs in the decision now rather than in month eight.

Ask for the maintenance number separately from the build number, in rupees, not as a vague percentage. And ask what breaks first if nobody touches the app for a year. The honest answer is usually the operating system update, and it is worth knowing before it happens rather than after — the full picture of what an app costs to build and to run is one conversation, not two quotes a year apart.