Every agency website has a page like this and most of them avoid the question. So: independent surveys of the Canadian market put most professional app builds between roughly CAD 25,000 and 90,000, with agency rates around CAD 90-160 per hour and freelancers at CAD 50-90. MVP packages start lower. Regulated fintech and health products routinely exceed CAD 250,000.
That range is uselessly wide, which is the actual point. “App” describes both a styled content reader and a regulated payments product. What follows is what moves you between those poles.
Complexity dominates everything else
The single biggest factor is not how many features you have, it is whether any one of them is genuinely hard.
A list-and-detail app backed by a content API is a well-understood problem. The screens vary, the architecture does not. Add any of the following and you are in a different cost bracket:
- Payments — not the integration itself, which is a few days, but the state machine around it. Every failure mode needs handling, and “mostly works” is not an acceptable standard for money.
- Real-time sync — two devices editing the same record is a distributed systems problem wearing a UI.
- Offline support — trivially specified, expensive to build. Conflict resolution is where the time goes.
- Background location — battery, permissions and platform restrictions that differ between iOS and Android and change between OS versions.
None of those are exotic. All of them get written as one line in a requirements document.
The integration surface nobody prices
Ask what your app must talk to. A payment processor, a CRM, an identity provider, a legacy internal database, a shipping API. Each one carries work that never appears in a feature list:
- Their authentication model, which may be nothing like yours
- Their rate limits, which shape your architecture
- Their sandbox, which may not behave like production
- Their onboarding timeline, which becomes your timeline
We have seen integration work exceed the cost of the app’s own features. It is routinely the largest gap between a quote and reality.
Platform count matters less than you think
The instinct is that two platforms cost twice as much. On a cross-platform build it does not — going from iOS-only to both is usually a modest increment for platform-specific polish and a second store submission.
Choosing native for both genuinely does approach two builds. That is why the native-versus-cross-platform decision is a budget decision as much as a technical one, and why we treat it as the first question to settle.
What “done” costs after launch
Budget 15-20% of the build cost per year for maintenance. This is not padding — mobile platforms move annually, APIs get deprecated, and Apple raises the minimum SDK required to ship any update at all.
Skipping it is deferred cost, not avoided cost, and it compounds: a two-year gap is materially more expensive than two annual passes, because you end up doing a migration before you can do the fix.
Quotes that should worry you
A fixed price before scoping. If nobody has asked what you integrate with, the number is a guess. One of us absorbs the difference, and the contract decides which.
A number far below the range. Sometimes it is a genuinely smaller scope than you think you asked for. More often the scope gap surfaces as change requests later. Ask what is explicitly excluded.
No maintenance line. An app quoted without ongoing cost is quoted incompletely.
Hourly with no cap and no estimate. Fine for genuine discovery work, a problem for a defined build.
How we do it
We scope first and quote against the scope, because the alternative is a number that one party will eventually eat. If your budget does not fit the scope, the useful conversation is about what to cut — and that conversation is much cheaper before the build than during it.
In a market with over 190 app development companies in Toronto alone, you can and should get more than one quote. Compare what is excluded, not just the totals.