App Development Services

An app’s cost is determined by its purpose, scope, and deployment platforms, which means there’s no one ‘average’ cost. Every app is different, and even apps that look superficially similar can have very different backend requirements.

A very simple mobile app – say, a habit-tracking app available solely on App Store – might cost $5,000 to build and launch. A more complex app, like a cross-platform e-learning platform for your business, might sit around $30,000. A web app built by a global consulting company for an Australian government agency might cost $96.5 million.

The simplest way to work out the approximate cost of your app is to send a detailed RFQ to at least 3 different app development agencies. That doesn’t mean you should go with the cheapest vendor, but it should give you a ballpark figure to work from.

Yes, you can. ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots are good at quickly generating functional code. They’ll even do things like define the project scope, map out the build process, and plan a launch campaign.

The problems start to emerge during deployment. We’ve spoken to multiple businesses that have deployed simple apps locally – that is, on their own computers – only to realise that running a cloud-based app with a 99.99% uptime is completely different.

If you do get your app live on a server, you need to then maintain the code – which is much, much harder when it lacks documentation and has no discernible logic. Security is also a serious concern. Unfortunately, prompting Claude with ‘make no mistakes and make it secure’ doesn’t actually work. Your app will likely have vulnerabilities, which matters if you’re storing or collecting any kind of sensitive data. (And, yes, you do have legal obligations you need to meet.)

Finally, even if you manage to solve all those problems, you then need to make sure your app is stable across multiple browsers, devices, and operating systems, and stays that way as new language versions roll out.

In other words: AI chatbots aren’t a shortcut to building an app. In fact, if you aren’t a software developer, you’ll probably waste a lot of time and tokens generating something that doesn’t work and creates a lot of liability for your business. It’s generally much, much easier to simply pay an experienced app development agency to build, test and maintain everything for you – especially if you want your app to deliver business outcomes of some kind.

Yes, you can, and many Australian brands do. From a pure cost standpoint, it can be tempting. Offshore development team typically cost somewhere in the realm of 30% to 50% less than Australian developers. Of course, like all professional services, you get what you pay for.

Offshore developers – the kind that cost substantially less than their Australian counterparts – are almost always working to lower quality standards. Sometimes, that manifests as a clearly inferior product: a Claude-generated design, poor architecture, and endless bugs.

Often, though, the app will actually look and feel good, until something goes wrong. There might, for example, be hidden security flaws that only get detected when a threat actor successfully breaches you. Or brittle code that breaks when your users interact with it in an unexpected way. Or a lack of documentation that prevents you from maintaining your app without that offshore developer.

While those problems are possible with any vendor, you’re less likely to encounter them if you choose an experienced local agency that’s regulated by Australian laws. (It’s much, much harder to sue someone in Thailand or India over a performance breach.) 

Like cost, build times vary hugely from app to app. If you want to create a relatively straightforward app, like a subscription media platform, you can expect it to take somewhere around 3 to 4 months from project commencement to deployment. (That, of course, assumes minimal revisions and no major roadblocks – lots of change requests, for example, can inflate those timelines.)