Insights · 5 min read
People ask how much an app costs. The honest answer is it depends on what's inside. Here's where the money actually goes and why team location moves the number.
By GGP Editorial
Every founder asks the same first question: how much does it cost to build? And they usually want the number before they have described the product. I understand the instinct. But the number is the last thing you can work out. The first thing is where the money goes, because that is what decides whether a quote is fair or inflated.
A software quote is not one number. It is a stack of decisions. Here is how a typical build breaks down:
| Component | Rough share of a build | What moves the number |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and design | 10-15% | How clear the requirements are at the start |
| Backend and database | 25-35% | Business rules, integrations, expected scale |
| Frontend, web or mobile | 20-30% | Number of screens and how polished they are |
| Integrations and APIs | 10-20% | Payment gateways and third-party services |
| Testing and QA | 10-15% | Compliance, security, device coverage |
| Project management | 5-10% | How much back-and-forth the project needs |
A simple internal tool with one user role and no payment sits near the bottom of every range. A customer-facing product with payments, two user roles, and an admin panel climbs fast. The difference between a cheap build and an expensive one is rarely the code. It is the number of rules, roles, and integrations.
To see how this plays out, take two projects we have actually built. A property rental and payment system that handles leases, auto-billing, and late-fee logic sits at the heavy end because the business rules are dense. A self-ordering system for a restaurant is lighter on the backend but heavy on the frontend and on offline mode, so the cost shifts rather than shrinks. The total is similar; the money just lands in different columns.
Scope is what sets the range, so here is a rough sense of scale before you talk to a vendor.
A simple internal dashboard with a couple of reports is a few weeks of work for one or two engineers. A customer-facing app with payments, accounts, and an admin panel runs two to four months with three or four people. A finance or trading system with compliance and settlement rules is six months and up, and the testing is where the hours go, not the feature work.
Notice how the cost does not rise evenly. Adding a second user role often means adding permissions, an audit trail, and separate screens, so the price can jump faster than you expect. Each extra integration, say a payment gateway or a logistics API, pulls in its own testing and edge cases. That is why two apps that look similar on the surface can land a world apart on price.
These are not quotes, just the order of magnitude. If a vendor gives you a number far outside these ranges without explaining why, ask for the breakdown behind it.
Hourly rates for engineers vary by a wide margin across the world. A senior developer in the US or Western Europe bills more than a comparable engineer in China, and that gap compounds on a build that runs three to six months.
We are a China-based team, founded in 2018, with 40-plus engineers and more than 300 delivered projects. The cost argument only works if the quality and the communication hold up, so that is where we put the effort. We have handled going-global delivery for clients across Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, and the United States, so the time-zone process is already in place rather than something we figure out on your project. We schedule overlapping hours with those clients, and each project gets a dedicated group where questions are answered in English or Portuguese. You get the rate without the midnight-only handoffs that make offshore work painful.
Three things keep a quote from drifting. First, lock the scope before you lock the price, and write down what done means for each screen. Second, break the build into milestones with payment tied to working software, not to documents. Third, plan for maintenance before launch. A product you keep running will cost roughly 15-20% of the build every year after it ships, and that line item is the one most founders forget.
And one more thing we tell clients who ask what industries we cover: as long as the project is not illegal, we will build it. Finance systems, property rental platforms, a self-ordering POS for restaurants, a cross-border e-commerce backend. We have done all of those. The requirements are what matter, not the industry label.
A fair quote is boring. It lists line items, states assumptions, and tells you what is not included. If a number shows up with no breakdown behind it, ask where the money goes. If they can't tell you, that is your answer.
Tell us what you are building and where you are today. We typically reply within 24 hours.
