Five Lines That Make App Quotes Comparable

Every Studio Priced a Different App

“Something like a used-goods marketplace.” A brief that arrives as one line leaves everyone reading it to picture a different product. One shop sees listings and a browse screen. Another assumes chat, identity verification, and a report queue come with the territory. They priced different apps, so the numbers came back different. Anyone who has collected three or four quotes is startled by the spread first. Padding is rarely what caused it.

Five places decide the scope. How many screens, which stores, whether login and payments and push are in, whether there is a backend, and how far the operator’s side gets built. Fill those five lines into the brief and the quotes that come back finally sit on one baseline.

Start by Counting Screens

Write down every screen a user passes through between opening the app and finishing what they came for. Onboarding, sign-up, home, list, detail, compose, profile, settings. The ones people miss are the state screens: what shows before there is any content, what shows when something fails, what shows when a search returns nothing. Add those and a “simple app” runs long fast. Screen count lands on the design bill and the development bill both, so the length of this list is the skeleton of the schedule and the price.

Drawing skill is not required. Boxes on paper, arrows between them. Making it look good belongs to a designer; your job is checking that nothing is missing. That one list becomes the shared vocabulary with whoever builds the thing, and it takes the heat out of the later argument about what was in scope.

Which Store, and From When

Shipping to iOS and Android at once decides the build method first. Two native codebases comes close to building the app twice. A cross-platform framework covers both stores from one codebase, though anything touching the hardware, camera and notifications especially, still needs separate attention per platform. A webview app wraps a site in a shell and is the lightest of the three. Apple has rejected apps that amount to nothing more than a wrapped website, so even a content-first service should decide early what it will do that the site cannot.

Two questions, then. Which store, and does it have to be both on day one? If the early users sit on one platform, launching there and halving the scope is an easy call to defend.

What Rides Along With Login, Payments, and Push

A feature list writes these as one line each and delivers them as slabs. Login is an account system, not a button: sign-up needs password recovery, and account deletion, and one more integration for every social provider added. Payments do not end at the checkout screen. Provider onboarding sits in front of it, and cancellations, refunds, and failed-charge handling sit behind it. Push is a pair, a sending side on the server and a settings screen on the device, and anything promotional pulls consent tracking along with it.

The Moment Data Leaves the Phone

Of the five, the backend swings the scope hardest. Accounts, the same data on two devices, users reading each other’s posts: any one of those puts a server and a database inside the job, along with the hosting bill that follows launch. If everything the app knows stays on the phone it is sitting on, this line stays empty and the quote reflects that.

The Screens Nobody Sees

Posting a notice, working through reports, managing members, reading a few numbers at the end of the month. Users never open these, and the service does not run without someone who can. How much of it version one builds, and what stays a manual job for a while, is part of scoping too. Leave it off the brief entirely and it becomes the change order that lands two weeks after launch.

Bring the Idea, We Fill In the Five

“I want to build an app like this” is enough to start a conversation; the five lines can stay blank. Weple’s app work fills them in with you, turns them into a scope document, and quotes the schedule and the cost against that document. Already holding quotes from elsewhere? We open them together and find the line where the numbers split. How we put a number on each of the five is laid out on the pricing page.