What the estimate is

An indicative range, generated by a documented model from the categorical answers you gave. It is genuinely useful for three things: sizing a budget before you have requirements, comparing the cost of options against each other, and sanity-checking a quote you have already received.

The midpoint is the model’s central figure, and the published range runs from ×0.86 to ×1.19 of it. Figures are rounded by magnitude on purpose, so the output never implies precision it does not have. A calculator that reports $487,213 is telling you something false about how well it knows your project.

What it is not

Not a quotation, a bid, or an offer capable of acceptance.
Not a commitment by anyone to perform work at any price.
Not financial, legal, tax, regulatory or investment advice.
Not a compliance determination. Whether HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, FedRAMP or any other regime applies to you is a question for your own counsel.
Not a substitute for discovery, or for a written scope from a real vendor.

What the model cannot know

These are the factors that actually move a software budget, and none of them can be selected from a dropdown:

The state of your existing systems, and how well they are documented.
The quality, volume and messiness of your data.
How quickly your organisation makes decisions, and how often it changes them.
What your security reviewers and procurement team will actually ask for.
How much of your scope will change once real users see version one.
The availability and seniority of the specific people who would do the work.

In our experience these dominate. A well-specified project with a decisive sponsor and clean data lands near the low end of a range; the same scope with an unclear owner and a legacy integration lands above the high end.

Rates and currency

All figures are in US dollars and reflect US-market rates for a US-based delivery team — a published band of $98–$180 per hour, applied per discipline. There is no offshore or nearshore rate card on this site. If you are comparing this estimate against an offshore quote, you are comparing different things, and the hour counts are the only fair basis for that comparison.

Excluded from the development figure

Reported separately on your result page, and deliberately never added into the build number: cloud hosting and metered vendor bills, annual maintenance, external compliance assessor fees, app store developer accounts, content production, marketing and hardware.

Third-party names

Where a well-known application is named, it is used only as a feature-complexity comparison to describe a shape of functionality. Those are not official estimates for those companies’ products, and this site is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

How to use it responsibly

Use the range to decide whether a project is fundable and which version of it to pursue. Then write requirements, and get a fixed-scope proposal against them before committing budget. Read the methodology so you know what the number assumes — an estimate without its assumptions is a guess with a dollar sign in front of it.

Contact

If a figure looks wrong for work you have delivered or commissioned, tell us: hello@app-development-cost.com.

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