Four questions, about a minute, and a personalised US-based development estimate at the end of it. We price your platforms, features, traffic, compliance and design in engineering hours — then show you exactly where every dollar goes.
A first version built to test a single hypothesis, priced at US rates. Your own configuration will differ on every axis.
Open this in the calculatorMost cost calculators multiply a base figure by a few coefficients and round to something memorable. This one accumulates engineering hours across independent axes and converts to dollars last — so every number on your result page can be traced to a decision you made.
What you are building, where it runs, how deep it goes, and how many people will use it. We infer the rest — features, integrations, compliance, design and admin scope — from what that kind of product actually needs.
Each answer contributes engineering hours to a named discipline. Nothing is a coefficient applied to a base figure, which is how other calculators inflate.
Each discipline is priced at its own US rate. Your blended rate is a result of your work mix rather than an assumption applied to it.
Cost range, timeline, hours, itemised scope, cost drivers, recommended team, running costs and annual maintenance. No email gate.
Every range below is produced by the calculator itself, from a complete configuration you can open and edit. These are feature-complexity comparisons priced at launch scope — not estimates for any named company’s product, and not affiliated with them.
Two apps, live dispatch, and money moving in both directions.
Two sides, a calendar, photography and split payments.
Three-sided: customers, couriers and kitchens.
Upload, transcode, rank and serve video at consumer scale.
Records, appointments, secure messaging and an EHR interface.
Accounts, cards, transfers and a ledger that must balance.
Catalogue, checkout, inventory and the peak that decides it all.
Workspaces, seats, roles, billing and SOC 2.
One flow, one audience, shipped to learn something.
Founders tend to think cost tracks the number of features. It tracks these instead.
The biggest lever on this page. Backend, data model, APIs and design system are built once; every additional client is its own implementation, store release and device matrix. A second platform adds roughly 20–30% to a project, not 100%.
Domain logic, user roles and data obligations differ enormously. The same booking tool costs materially more for a clinic than for a salon, before a single compliance box is ticked.
HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS and FedRAMP are engineering work: audit logging, access control, key management and the evidence to prove it. Typically 15–25% of a regulated build, and none of it is a visible feature.
Scale is not a surcharge, it is specific infrastructure — caching, read replicas, queues, load testing, partitioning. Peak concurrency, not monthly users, is what decides the architecture.
Real-time, payments, video and AI are the four categories teams underestimate most. Each carries failure modes, reconciliation and testing well beyond the happy path.
Premium design runs about three times the per-screen cost of applying platform conventions. And the admin product your own team uses is routinely a fifth of the build.
Your estimate is not one number times one rate. Each discipline is priced at what that work costs in the US market, from $98 an hour for QA to $180 for architecture. That is why a compliance-heavy build genuinely costs more per hour than a simple one — and why we show you the mix.
Each page prices that axis honestly, with the constraints and gotchas that actually change a budget.