How Much Does It Cost to Design an App: All Factors Revealed

App design price varies from $5,000 to $30,000 or more. The main factor in understanding total cost is app complexity. The complexity of your app's user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design is a crucial cost factor. Custom designs that deviate from standard templates and incorporate unique app ideas and design guidelines. Such type of design development allows you to create different apps without looking at how much it costs.

So, let’s take a closer look closer at such three types of app design complexity:

• The typical cost range for a simple app design is between $5,000–$10,000+.

What’s included: Simple design covers basic UI design for core screens, standard user flows, simple interaction patterns, and template-based components with minimal branding. It is mostly used for early-stage products and suits teams that want to build an app quickly for validation before investing in advanced design or a full release to the app store.

• The typical cost range for a medium app design is between $15,000–$40,000.

What’s included: Medium design focuses on richer functionality and covers custom UI for key screens, multiple user flows and states, a basic design system, and limited animations or interactive elements. This level suits products that need a balanced approach to design quality and budget predictability. It helps teams maintain consistent UX while keeping overall product costs under control.

• The typical cost range for a complex app design is between $40,000–$100,000+.

What’s included: Complex design involves fully custom UI and UX, advanced animations and microinteractions, complex user journeys, and an enterprise-grade design system. This level is common for large-scale or long-term products where design directly impacts scalability, UX consistency, and the overall product lifecycle. It supports functionality and high user expectations across platforms.

Look through the table below to outline typical app design cost ranges by complexity level, highlighting what is usually included at each stage and which factors tend to increase the overall budget.

A software development company, even one with extensive experience, cannot provide an accurate design cost estimate solely based on an idea. It's vital to understand the factors that influence the cost of app design services and why a basic concept isn't sufficient to determine the price.

Feature complexity directly impacts app design cost because different types of functionality require varying levels of UI/UX effort. Basic features such as static screens or simple navigation are usually covered during discovery and wireframing, while more advanced functionality, such as real-time updates, role-based access, or interactive dashboards, requires deeper prototyping, validation, and user flow design, which expands the overall scope.

As feature depth grows, designers must account for additional states, edge cases, and non-linear user journeys. This increases design time and requires closer coordination with developers during handoff and implementation planning, compared to apps with limited functionality and straightforward flows.

The table below shows how different feature types typically affect design effort and overall cost.

Platform selection also affects the mobile app design price. If you want to create two native apps, designers must adapt the same user flows to different interaction models, because iOS and Android require different UX guidelines. Such an approach increases design hours and directly affects app design cost. In practice, designing for both platforms usually increases the total design budget by 15–30% compared to a single-platform app.

Cross-platform development helps reduce design costs by reusing shared UI components and interaction patterns across platforms. Compared to designing two native apps separately, cross-platform design is usually 20–40% more cost-efficient, although additional effort may still be required to ensure consistent behavior across devices.

Web app design relies on a single UI model and fewer platform-specific requirements, so its cost mainly depends on the overall design complexity. As a result, web design budgets tend to be more predictable, while still varying based on the number of screens, interactions, and custom visual elements.

For one of our clients, Row Nation, we recommended a cross-platform approach early in the app design process, which allowed the team to reuse core UI patterns and significantly reduce design effort. This decision helped make the app faster to design and cut both design expenses and the total project cost by almost 50%, while keeping the user experience consistent across platforms. Close collaboration between designers and the app developer team ensured smooth handoff and predictable delivery.

Discover how the client highlights our collaboration in their video testimonial:

Integrating an app with third-party services or APIs can significantly affect the cost of mobile solutions, as many integrations require additional UI states, screens, and user flows. Common examples of integrations include payment systems such as Stripe or Apple Pay, authentication via Google or Apple login, map services like Google Maps, analytics platforms, and in-app messaging tools used when creating an app with extended functionality.

Designers must account for loading states, error handling, permissions, and platform-specific behaviors to ensure integrations remain functional and visually consistent with the product. Each additional third-party integration typically increases app design effort by 10–15%, while products with 5 or more integrations often see total design costs grow by 30–50% due to added states, edge cases, and validation flows. This complexity also extends timelines and raises future maintenance costs as integrated services change APIs or require UI adjustments.

A practical example comes from our US-based client. Cleveroad experts designed for them a human hydration monitoring system, integrated with IoT hydration devices via Bluetooth. Because the app had to handle device pairing, connection loss, and continuous data sync, our designers created additional user flows for onboarding, device management, and data interpretation, along with separate UI states for errors and reconnection.

These integration-driven scenarios required extra screens and validation logic, which increased the overall design scope compared to a standard mobile application without external device dependencies.

Different types of collaboration come with their own pros and cons, which can impact how much to design an app:

In-house design team

• Typical cost: $6,000–$12,000+ per month for a designer

Leveraging an in-house design team provides the advantage of close collaboration and seamless communication. Having a team within your organization offers full control over the design process and ensures a deep understanding of your company's culture. However, it comes with higher operational and salary expenses and may be less scalable for large projects.

Outsourcing to design agencies

• Typical cost: $50–$120 per hour or $10,000–$40,000+ per project

Outsourcing your design needs to a specialized agency is often regarded as the most beneficial cooperation model. It grants access to a diverse talent pool with expertise in various design disciplines, ensuring that your project benefits from a wide range of skills and creative perspectives. This approach is highly scalable, making it suitable for complex and ambitious projects. Outsourcing allows you to tap into the agency's extensive resources, which can lead to faster project completion and a more comprehensive design solution.

It's essential to carefully consider these factors and choose the collaboration type that aligns with your project's goals, budget, and requirements. Discussing these aspects with potential design partners will help you make an informed decision about the best approach for your mobile app design project. As ScienceDirect states, a qualitative design provides smooth and distraction-free pathways toward achieving goals.

The location of the app development company, which provides you with a dedicated team, can affect costs due to variations in labor rates. Design teams located in regions with higher living costs may charge more for their services. Conversely, working with designers in regions with lower labor costs may offer cost savings while maintaining quality, which makes location an important factor to consider in your overall budget planning.

How much is it to design an app in different countries? Each IT company evaluates the processes differently, but most companies follow this evaluation sample:

Hourly rate x number of hours spent = application design charge

Imagine that you develop a complex solution, outsourcing the design features to Estonia. Some approximate estimates:

246h (max time for design) x $50 (Estonian mean wage per hour) = $12,300 (for Android and iOS).

For instance, the cost of top design services may include hourly amounts to $150 in the USA or Canada. That will be up to $36,900 for the iOS and Android app UI/UX design. Here’s the thing: if you don’t have well-skilled design specialists around (or the app designers' cost is too high), you can use the services of software development companies abroad.

App design creation consists of several crucial stages. Below, we’ll discuss how each stage influences the app design and approximate prices.

At the beginning of the UI/UX app development process, design specialists analyze competitors, business objectives, and the target audience to design a mobile app that fits real product constraints. This phase produces concrete research artifacts such as user personas, JTBD scenarios, usability benchmarks, and feature-priority assumptions, which help teams make your app more predictable to build and clearly distinguish it from a basic app with minimal validation.

Why this stage affects cost: Immersive research defines clear boundaries for design work by validating user needs and constraints early, which shortens development time and reduces the risk of late-stage redesign. By fixing key assumptions upfront, a tech partner like Cleveroad also helps limit long-term app maintenance cost, which often increases when usability and structural issues surface after launch.

• Estimated time: 40–80 hours
• Estimated cost: $2,000–$4,000+

Wireframes define the structural layout of the design of an app by mapping screens, content hierarchy, and user flows before any visual UX design begins. Teams structure navigation logic and align layouts with platform guidelines, ensuring the app might support real user scenarios and technical constraints from the start.

Why this stage affects app design cost: Wireframes translate research into an approved structural foundation that can influence app scope and implementation complexity. By validating user flows and screen structure early, teams reduce redesign during development, keep design effort predictable, or maintain control over timelines and overall project cost.

• Estimated time: 60–100 hours
• Estimated cost: $3,000–$5,000+

Prototyping converts approved wireframes into high-fidelity UI screens that reflect the final visual style and interaction behavior of an app. At this stage, designers align interfaces with platform design guidelines, validate app functionality through interactive models, and adapt layouts for multiple devices as part of developing a mobile app ready for production.

Why this stage affects app design cost: Prototyping finalizes visual and interaction decisions for an app in 2026, when UI standards and user expectations are higher than ever. Once prototypes are approved, changes often lead to partial app redesign, which directly increases the app price due to added design effort and extended implementation timelines.

Cleveroad, like most companies, can provide clickable or static prototypes upon your request. The other stages consist of building up graphic elements such as icons and illustrations or preparing complex animations and individual evaluation of mobile UI design costs.

• Estimated time: 80–160 hours
• Estimated cost: $4,000–$8,000+

Various strategic approaches can be employed to reduce app design price. These approaches help optimize the design process, ensuring efficiency without compromising on quality or user experience.

Here are some effective methods to cut app design costs:

Effective planning is the foundation of cost-efficient app design. Clear scope definition sets expectations for what is included in the first release and what is intentionally excluded, preventing uncontrolled design expansion.

When defining a software concept, it’s important to assess the overall complexity of the product and the features planned for the first release. Early scope alignment helps prevent late-stage design expansion, which is one of the most common reasons design budgets grow unexpectedly. Clearly defined design boundaries at each stage make design effort more predictable and directly influence the final app design cost.

Feature prioritization is a key cost-control mechanism in app design. By focusing on core functionality for the initial release, teams reduce the number of screens and interaction scenarios that must be designed and validated upfront. This MVP-driven approach allows design resources to be allocated more efficiently and enables faster launch, while additional features are introduced later based on real user feedback.

Cross-platform design can be a cost-efficient option when targeting multiple platforms. Reusable design systems reduce duplicated design effort by allowing components and interaction patterns to be shared across platforms.

However, cost savings depend on how closely platform behaviors can be aligned. Significant platform divergence may increase complexity instead of reducing it, making early validation of reuse potential critical for cost control.

Early prototyping helps validate ideas and core functionality before full-scale UI/UX work begins, improving control over mobile app development costs. Prototypes let teams test feature behavior, estimate the mobile app design price, and reduce uncertainty around the cost of creating a new app. Interactive models also help align with user expectations and avoid costly design changes later.

AI prototyping services from Cleveroad help test complex UX scenarios earlier, reducing redesign risks and shortening validation cycles, as well as improving cost efficiency by limiting rework in later design and development phases.

Working with an experienced design team helps reduce app design cost by minimizing unnecessary iteration cycles and rework. Teams with established UI/UX processes typically reach validated solutions faster, which directly lowers total design effort. When selecting a design team, focus on proven delivery experience and their ability to translate business goals into usable interfaces.

Offshore or nearshore teams can further reduce app design costs, especially for cross-platform projects. Cost efficiency is achieved when design decisions are aligned early and supported by structured communication and transparent project management.

Feel free to explore our Dribbble to check our design expertise.

Cleveroad is a professional software development company located in Central Europe, which is one of the most famous outsourcing destinations due to its reasonable software creation rates. For over 15 years, we have been helping businesses in various industries deliver custom app design to ensure their brand excellence and user engagement.

Our design specialists start working from the very beginning of the application building to launching the final product. Our team conducts Research, Wireframing, Visual Style, Design, and Delivery, ensuring top quality through all the steps.

Here's what you get by appealing to our UI/UX design services:

• 15+ years of experience in creating eye-catching mobile designs for all screen sizes and platforms.
• Client-centered web design for various devices in FullHD quality to ensure page load optimization and site responsiveness.
• Expertise in app wireframing and prototyping, mockup creation, sketching, and other design services applying the latest UI/UX practices.
• Mature quality management proven by an ISO 9001 certificate to meet the quality needs of software development.
• UI/UX consulting from professionals with an in-depth understanding of business needs.

How cost estimation is done for your project? In determining the app design cost, we provide our clients with two types of estimates: Rough and Detailed.

A rough estimate serves as an initial, high-level cost projection provided to the client. In our project management approach, we create two distinct rough estimates to ensure cost accuracy at different stages of development:

• First rough estimate: Created after the Solution Design Workshop, this high-level estimate outlines optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic scenarios and defines an initial design scope, including screens, roles, and UX complexity. It helps set priorities and align features with the available budget.
• Second rough estimate: Refined during the Discovery Phase, this estimate validates user flows, wireframes, and platform-specific UI requirements, identifies design risks, and updates costs based on more accurate design inputs.

A detailed estimate is the most precise cost projection in project management, offering nearly 100% accuracy. It involves direct participation from the development team responsible for the product's creation. These detailed estimates are crafted post-Discovery Phase, during the development stage, when core UX decisions, user flows, screen structure, and platform-specific design assumptions are already validated.

Utilizing the insights gathered during the Discovery Phase, our team uses this estimate as a foundation to define detailed requirements, typically through user stories, in an iterative process. Each user story is evaluated, resulting in a comprehensive estimate.