App development
cost in the UK.
Honest 2026 pricing for building a mobile or web app in the UK — day rates, project bands, what makes the number move, and where your money actually goes. Free working prototype + senior PO analysis before any paid engagement.
What you get
at each price band.
Six published bands — from a free coded prototype to a regulated enterprise platform. No padded estimates, no fixed-price-on-a-vague-brief games.
Free working prototype
A senior Product Owner scopes the core flow with you, and we ship a coded prototype — yours to keep. 5 – 10 working days. £0.
Discovery sprint
Two weeks of senior PO + Solution Architect: validated problem, costed architecture, phased roadmap, fixed-price quote for the build. From £3,000.
Startup MVP
One or two flows fully working, one platform, production hosting, auth, analytics, 30 days post-launch maintenance. From £10,000.
Full production build
iOS + Android + web, admin, integrations, full QA, CI/CD, monitoring, 3 months maintenance. Most land £30K–£150K. From £30,000.
Bespoke enterprise / CRM
Domain modelling, legacy integration, audit logging, GDPR data-subject tooling, phased rollout. Range £80,000 – £500,000+, scoped after Discovery.
Maintenance retainer
Severity-tiered bug-fix SLA, library updates, security patches, quarterly enhancement releases. £3,500 – £9,000 / month.
What you're actually
paying for.
A £100,000 UK app project breaks down predictably. If an offshore quote is 60% cheaper, something below is missing — usually senior PO time and the QA cycle.
Senior engineering 50 – 60%
The people writing production code. UK-based, in-house, on the project end-to-end — no staff augmentation, no offshore rotation. iOS, Android, web, backend.
Senior PO + Design 25 – 30%
Scoping, sequencing, blocker-removal, user-journey mapping, wireframes, full mocks. The bit offshore quotes silently delete to look 60% cheaper.
QA + DevOps + buffer 10 – 20%
Automated tests, regression, manual QA, CI/CD, cloud setup, security baseline, contracts, contingency, hand-over. The bit that stops the build breaking on day one.
The five tiers of
UK app pricing.
Most published "average UK app cost" numbers blur five very different markets. Here is how Magora's senior team actually sorts them.
Offshore freelancers
£15 – 30 / hourSolo developers in India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Philippines. Raw hourly cost is unbeatable for narrow, well-specified work. No PO, no QA, no compliance, no UK legal accountability. Time-zone drag adds ~30% to delivery.
Offshore agencies, UK-fronted
£25 – 50 / hourUK-registered shop-front, sales and PM in London, delivery in Eastern Europe or India. PM layer fixes the worst freelancer problems but is a single bottleneck. IP transfer enforceable only in the offshore jurisdiction.
London product-engineering houses ← Magora
£45 – 90 / hourUK-registered, in-house teams of 30 – 300, English-law contracts, senior PO on every project, GDPR by default. Right for exploratory work, regulated industries (healthcare, FinTech, education) and AI builds. Magora sits here.
Boutique London digital agencies
£60 – 140 / hour5 – 30 person agencies, design-led, branding crossover. Beautiful UI, strong design opinion. Engineering depth varies wildly — many subcontract backend. Right for consumer-facing apps where design is the differentiator.
Tier-1 consultancies
£120 – 250 / hourGlobal consulting groups offering enterprise digital programmes. Programme delivery at scale, board-level reporting. The £200/h rate is mostly hierarchy — junior consultants do most of the work. Right for enterprise transformation ≥ £1M, not product builds.
Pick the right tier
Decision frameworkIf the brief is rigid and narrow → Tier 1 – 2. If the brief will evolve and you need senior thinking → Tier 3 (Magora). If design is the entire product → Tier 4. If you have a 9-figure programme budget and a board to report to → Tier 5.
Eight things
move the number.
Two apps that look identical from the outside can be 3× apart in price. Here is what actually drives the delta.
- 1 platform = baseline
- iOS + Android + web ≈ 1.8×
- + admin panel ≈ 2.3×
- Cross-platform (Flutter / RN) trims ~30%
- FinTech / FCA: +25 – 40%
- NHS / healthcare: +25 – 40%
- Open Banking / PSD2: +30%
- GDPR baked in
- Stripe, Twilio, HubSpot: +5 – 10%
- Salesforce: +10 – 15%
- Legacy SOAP / custom API: +10 – 15%
- Docs quality drives the spread
- LLM API bolt-on: cheap
- RAG + vector DB: +£30K
- Fine-tuned model: +£25K
- AI agents: +£20K – 100K
- 16 → 10 weeks: +30%
- Parallelisation overhead
- Overtime premium
- QA still non-negotiable
- Template-led: baseline
- Custom UI system: +15 – 20%
- Motion / micro-interactions: +5 – 10%
- Multi-brand theming: +10%
- < 100K records: baseline
- Millions of rows: +15% (infra)
- Real-time + websockets: +15%
- Search / Elasticsearch: +10%
- Bug fixes only: £3.5K / mo
- + enhancements: £5 – 7K / mo
- + security & SLA: £7 – 9K / mo
- Hosting billed separately
What clients say
about the pricing.
Pulled from independently-verified Clutch reviews — 60+ of them, 4.9 average. Pricing transparency is the single most quoted reason for choosing Magora.
The Discovery output was the first time a London agency showed me where the money was actually going — line by line. We could compare against two other quotes inside a week.
Free working prototype landed in nine days. Saved us from a £40K mistake — turned out the flow we thought was the product wasn't the product at all.
Fixed-price quote after Discovery came in £8K under another London agency, and £12K over the offshore one. We picked Magora — the offshore quote had silently dropped the QA cycle.
Apps we've shipped
at every band.
Four from the wider portfolio — actual budget bands so you can calibrate your own number.
Rollio
Enterprise data automation — multi-tenant admin, integrations, audit logging. Discovery-led, phased delivery.
See case study → E-commerce · £35K MVPAwnings
Bespoke e-commerce backend powering catalogue and checkout. Single web platform, full QA, 30 days post-launch.
See case study → CRM · £120K enterprisePharmCard
Enterprise CRM for field sales and management — domain modelling, legacy integration, audit logging, phased rollout.
See case study → IoT consumer · £45K MVP+SmartBall
IoT consumer app — iOS + Android + BLE, sensor pipeline, cloud sync. Single regulated jurisdiction, full QA cycle.
See case study →The honest
pricing questions.
Median UK app project sits around £60,000 – £120,000 across London product-engineering houses. Magora's published bands: free working prototype £0, Discovery from £3,000, Startup MVP from £10,000, full production mobile or web build from £30,000, bespoke enterprise from £80,000+.
Below £10,000 you are looking at offshore freelance, not a UK agency.
Five clear tiers in the UK market:
- Offshore freelancers: £15 – 30 / hour
- Offshore agencies with UK-fronted PM: £25 – 50 / hour
- London product-engineering houses (Magora sits here): £45 – 90 / hour
- Boutique London digital agencies: £60 – 140 / hour
- Tier-1 consultancies: £120 – 250 / hour
Magora's effective rate is £45 – 85 / hour for senior-led in-house delivery. See our bespoke software and mobile app development services.
Cheaper per hour, usually more expensive across an 18-month lifecycle. When an offshore agency quotes 60% less for "the same project", they have removed 80% of the senior Product Owner time and 50% of the QA cycle. The build ships, but it ships the wrong thing — or breaks at the first production load.
For narrow, well-specified work where you (or your in-house team) can review every commit, offshore freelance can work. For anything where the brief will evolve, start with a Magora Discovery sprint.
A coded prototype lands in 5 – 10 working days. A Startup MVP ships in 6 – 8 weeks. A full production mobile or web project runs 3 – 6 months. Bespoke enterprise platforms typically 6 – 12 months.
Compressing a 16-week timeline into 10 weeks adds about 30% to the price for overtime and parallelisation overhead — usually not worth it unless there is a real external deadline.
Yes — after Discovery. Any agency that fixed-prices a vague brief is either padding by 40% to cover unknowns or will run out of money halfway through. Both end badly.
Magora's standard model: free working prototype → £3,000 Discovery sprint → fixed-price quote for the build. You can take the Discovery output to another agency for comparison — we have had clients do this. Either choice is fine with us.
The free working prototype + Discovery sprint at £3,000 gives you a coded prototype and a roadmap. The cheapest paid production build is the Startup MVP at £10,000: one or two flows, one platform, production hosting, auth, analytics, 30 days post-launch maintenance.
Below £10,000 you are not realistically buying a UK-built app — you are buying offshore freelance hours dressed up in a UK invoice.
You pay for in-house senior delivery, English-law contracts, GDPR and EU AI Act compliance by default, and a single accountable legal entity (Magora is Thinking Fish Ltd, UK Companies House 03637036, founded 2010).
Across an 18-month project lifecycle the UK premium usually pays back through fewer rebuilds, fewer compliance incidents, and a real Product Owner who pushes back when the scope drifts. See our bespoke software page for the full delivery model.
Yes. Standard Magora payment model: 25% on Discovery sign-off, 25% at the design milestone, 25% at the production-ready milestone, 25% on go-live. Adjustable for specific cash-flow constraints — speak to sales@magora.co.uk or book a discovery call.
The £10,000 Startup MVP covers one or two core flows fully working, production hosting on AWS or GCP with monitoring, authentication and user management, baseline analytics, and one platform (iOS, Android, or web). 30 days of post-launch maintenance included.
Additional flows, second mobile platform, third-party integrations, AI features and admin panels are quoted as add-ons. Typical MVPs with one platform and 2 – 3 integrations land in the £15 – 25K range.
Yes. IPR in bespoke software shall, without prejudice to our rights in pre-existing IPR, be transferred to you on payment of the requested amount relating to such work. Source code, designs and IP all transfer in full — English-law contract, Companies House 03637036.
Watch out for agencies that retain rights to reuse code on "non-competing" projects — the definition of "competing" is usually buried in legal fine print. We don't do that.
Need a precise
quote in 48 hours?
30-minute call with a senior Product Owner. We'll scope the core flow, give you a written band, and ship a free working prototype inside 5 – 10 working days. No commitment, no charge.