Price your app
Free account · Two quick questions · Personalized cost breakdown
What drives the cost?
The preset includes discovery and safety reporting plus accounts / profiles, matching / recommendations, chat / live updates, payments / subscriptions, admin dashboard. Profiles, mutual matching, text chat, and block/report controls.
Compare build options
Public example using the default preset. Get your free estimate above for a breakdown of your selected scope.
| Build option | One-off labor | Recurring budget |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 paid labor; your time excluded | $339 + your maintenance time |
| Freelancer | $27,900–$146,250 | $2,499–$5,019/year |
| Agency | $38,750–$183,750 | $3,339–$6,219/year |
| Superapp Pro | You build and review the app | $639/year illustrative budget |
Default preset breakdown and assumptions
- Estimated effort
- 1550–3750 hours
- Delivery effort at 30 productive hours/week
- 51.7–125.0 person-weeks
- Global agency hourly range
- $25–$49
- Global freelancer hourly range
- $18–$39
- Custom design adjustment
- +25% effort (planning assumption)
- Hosting / platform
- $240/year
- Maintenance labor
- $3,000–$5,880/year
- Additional services
- $0/year
- Apple membership
- $99/year
Hours include implementation and testing, not a delivery guarantee. Website scope starts at 12–140 hours plus 2–5 hours for each additional page. App scope starts at 400–5,000 hours depending on complexity. Selected features add the effort below. Annual domain and hosting budgets are placeholders, not provider quotes.
Selected feature assumptions
Incremental engineering hours used by this calculator.
| Feature | Hours |
|---|---|
| Accounts / profiles | 40–80 |
| Matching / recommendations | 80–180 |
| Chat / live updates | 80–160 |
| Payments / subscriptions | 40–100 |
| Admin dashboard | 60–140 |
| Discovery and safety reporting | 140–340 |
Discovery and safety reporting
Start with explicit preferences and a simple discovery queue. Ranking experiments, location privacy, blocks, and reports need deliberate design before expanding recommendation sophistication.
What costs remain after launching a dating app
Trust and safety review, identity services, and support cannot be replaced by a moderation button. Budget staff and vendor fees separately from profile, matching, and messaging development.
A cheaper way to start with Superapp
Build a focused version yourself before commissioning a full custom project. Superapp Pro is $25 a month; the subscription covers its plan allowance, while your time, extra usage, integrations, hosting, and specialist work remain part of the budget. A Superapp site is an alternative implementation, not a guarantee of WordPress or Shopify compatibility.
Compare Superapp plansSources and methodology
Rates are global marketplace benchmarks, not US-only agency quotes. Freelancer and agency ranges overlap because they describe different samples. WordPress.com Personal and Shopify Basic use annual billing, exclude introductory promotions and taxes, and replace the hosting budget. Feature hours and recurring budgets are our explicit planning assumptions.