How much does it cost to build an app — and how long does it take?

How long does it take to build an app?

With an agency or a freelancer. In GoodFirms' 2026 survey of 300+ web development agencies and freelancers, the most common timeline for a custom web application is 8–16 weeks (35.5% of respondents), and 2–4 weeks for a basic website or MVP (71%).¹ Benchmarks of completed projects agree: in ISBSG's database the median small project took 3 months from start to finish,² and the web development projects reviewed on Clutch typically ran for 9 months.³

Why so long, when the code itself is not that much work? Developers spend only about 11–15% of their working time writing code — around 84 minutes a day in a large study at Microsoft — and the rest on meetings, coordination, reviews, setup and waiting.⁴⁵ Bain estimates that writing code accounts for 25–35% of the time from an idea to a product launch.⁶ Calendar time is spent around the code, not in it.

With Chattee. We measured every project started on Chattee between April 16, 2026 and September 17, 2026: the time from its first prompt to its first working build — the first run of the AI that completed and wrote application code, deployed and reachable in the browser. It is calendar time: reading and approving the plan, answering the AI's questions and being away all count. For the projects that reached one, the median was 15 min (nine in ten within 34 min); 94% of them had a working app within an hour, 98% within a day. The AI's own working time, without the waits, was a median 12 min.

Our internal benchmark points the same way. In 18 complete builds from scratch since September 11, 2026, on the configuration production ran then — apps with a frontend, a backend and a database — the median build took 26 min, between 16 min and 41 min. Its prompts are well specified and its questions answered at once, so it measures the machine, not a person's calendar.

The arithmetic. 8 weeks are 80,640 minutes. Divided by the median of 15 min, that is 5,412× faster. The homepage says 10×: we compare with the fast end of the agency range and round down to a step of a fixed ladder (see how we calculate).

How fast can you change a running app?

In a development team. The DORA research programme asks thousands of teams every year how long a change takes from code committed to code running in production. In 2025 they answered:⁷

The median team sits between one day and one week, and 75.6% of teams need a day or more. That clock only starts once the change is written: describing it, scheduling it and writing it come on top.

On Chattee. A change is a message in the project's chat; the AI edits the code, builds it and deploys it. Measured on every completed change to an existing app since April 16, 2026, the median took 3.1 min from message to finished run (nine in ten within 10 min). In our benchmark's 60 edits of a running app, the median was 3.1 min including deployment and checks, of which the AI itself worked 0.9 min.

The arithmetic. Against one day — the fast end of the median team's range — a median of 3.1 min is 99.7% less time. The homepage says 90%, rounded down to the ladder and capped at what we committed to before we saw the data.

What does it cost to build an app in 2026?

With an agency or a freelancer. GoodFirms' 2026 survey puts the most common price of a custom web application at $20,000–50,000 (35.5% of respondents) and of a basic website or MVP at $1,000–3,000.¹ In a second GoodFirms survey, 66% of software companies said they typically charge $30,000–100,000 for small to mid-sized projects.⁸ Projects reviewed on Clutch averaged $66,499, while most of them stayed under $10,000.³

Day rates explain the spread. Freelance software developers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland ask a median of €90/h; half of 2,337 profiles charge 80–100 euros an hour.⁹ Across all fields, freelancers averaged €103/h in 2026.¹⁰ IT freelancers on Malt charged €690 a day on average in the three months before we checked,¹¹ and IT service providers charge around €805 a day for a developer with more than three years of experience.¹² Our free app cost estimator prices a day of a German agency at €1,100 and of a freelancer at €650.

On Chattee. The Pro plan costs €49 a month and includes 250 build credits (Lite: €19 with 100; Business: €99 with 600). A small change uses about 2–3 credits, a complete app with a backend and a database about 45–75. In our data, the median first build used 50 credits, and 100% of first builds fit into one month of Pro.

The arithmetic. We compare with the low end of the agencies' most common price, $20,000: €17,702 at the European Central Bank's reference rate of 1.1298 dollars per euro on October 1, 2026.¹³ For the saving to be at least 80%, Chattee may cost at most 20% of that, €3,540. We count 3 months of Pro (€147) — far longer than a median build takes — which leaves €3,393: 37 hours of your own time, valued at the freelancer median of €90/h. Spend less of your own time and the saving is larger. To put in your own numbers, use the ROI calculator.

For a basic website at $1,000–3,000, the saving is smaller, and the homepage does not claim it.

Our data

• Registered users: 1,325 (the homepage rounds down to 1,300+). Accounts with a confirmed email address that are not blocked, created since Chattee became an app builder, without our own team's accounts and without accounts from deal-site promotions. Accounts that existed when email confirmation became mandatory count as confirmed; deleted accounts do not count.
• Countries: 112+ — the countries our users come from. A user's country is their billing country, or the country our server located when they signed up. Users whose country we do not know are not counted, so the real number can only be higher.
• Projects and changes: projects started between April 16, 2026 and September 17, 2026, so that each had at least 14 days to build. Our own projects, templates and copies of templates are not counted, and only projects that still exist can be measured. 29% of these projects reached a working build.

What independent research says about AI and development speed

These studies measure AI that helps a developer write code. Chattee takes over the build itself — plan, code, database, deployment and checks — so what it saves is calendar time, not typing time. That is why its gains are largest on new apps of the kind it builds, and why studies that find little or no speed-up in large, mature codebases are not a contradiction. Bain finds the same pattern in companies: teams that only add coding assistants gain 10–15%, teams that change the whole process 25–30%.⁶ And the often-quoted claim that low-code makes development ten times faster goes back to a 2015 Forrester report built on four customer examples.²¹

What these numbers don't say

• A first working build is not a finished product. It is an app you can open and use; reviewing it, testing it with real users and refining it takes more changes and more time.
• Calendar time is measured as it happened. Projects whose owners approved the plan days later are in the median.
• Only projects that still exist are measured. Deleted projects are not in the medians.
• Draft is not production. A build is deployed to its Draft environment; publishing to Live is a separate step, and no human code review is included — a development team's lead time usually includes one.
• The agency figures are self-reported ranges. Agencies report them about their own projects; a custom web app is the comparison, not a basic website.
• Euros are converted at one day's exchange rate.
• Country data covers only part of our users.
• The internal benchmark is ours, with a small number of well-specified tasks.
• None of these numbers is a claim about code quality or security.
• They apply to new web apps of the kind Chattee builds — dashboards, portals, internal tools, landing pages, apps with accounts and a database — not to large or existing codebases.

How we calculate

Definitions first, data second: what we measure and the most each claim may ever say (10×, 90%, 80%) were fixed before we looked at the data. Each homepage number is the largest step of its ladder — 2×, 3×, 5×, 10×, 20×, 50× for speed, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 95% for savings — that the measured value reaches and the fixed limit allows; data that reaches only a lower step shows the lower step, and we never switch to a friendlier measure. Our own times and costs are rounded up, baselines and results rounded down. A median is the middle value (the mean of the two middle values for an even count); nine in ten values stay at or under the 90th percentile. We refresh the numbers at least once a year. This edition uses data up to October 1, 2026.

FAQ

How much does it cost to build an app in 2026?

It depends on who builds it. In GoodFirms' 2026 survey of 300+ agencies and freelancers, a custom web application most often costs $20,000–50,000 and takes 8–16 weeks; a basic website or MVP costs $1,000–3,000 and takes 2–4 weeks. Freelance developers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland charge a median €90/h. On Chattee the software costs €49 a month on the Pro plan, and a complete app with a backend and a database typically uses 45–75 of its 250 monthly credits.

How long does it take to build an app with AI?

On Chattee, half of the projects that reached a working app had it within 15 min of their first prompt, waiting time included (projects started between April 16, 2026 and September 17, 2026); 98% of them had one within a day. That is a first working version, not a finished product: plan for more changes, which took a median 3.1 min each.

Is “10× faster” a fair comparison with an agency?

Only with its caveats, which is why we publish them. It compares the calendar time to a first working app on Chattee with the 8 weeks agencies quote at the low end for a custom web app — a quote that also pays for discovery, design, testing and launch. The measured ratio is 5,412×; the homepage rounds it down to 10×.

Do AI coding tools make developers faster?

Randomized studies disagree: from 55.8% faster on one well-defined task (Peng et al., 2023) to 19% slower for experienced developers in large, mature codebases (METR, 2025). Writing code takes only about 11–15% of a developer's time, so a tool that only speeds up typing barely moves a delivery date. Chattee takes over the whole build, which is why it shortens calendar time.

Sources

Every source was checked on October 1, 2026.