You have the platform. A local gym says yes in principle. Now you have to say a number, and there is no price list to copy because every vendor in this market has a reason to quote you a flattering one.
So start from the other end. Work out your floor, then decide what sits on top of it.
What the platforms suggest — and why to discount it
The companies selling reseller programmes publish guidance on what to charge. AppInstitute suggests a setup fee of £300–£1,000 plus around £99 a month, and says resellers typically land between £49 and £99 a month per app. Other vendor material quotes $1,500–$5,000 setup and $50–$200 a month.
Treat all of it as a starting bracket, not evidence. These are the people whose platform fee you are about to pay; a reseller who believes they can charge $200 a month is a reseller who signs up. The ranges are plausible, the confident end of them is marketing.
What the numbers do tell you is the shape of the market: a few hundred up front, then double digits monthly. That shape is consistent everywhere, and it is the part worth copying.
Your actual floor
Add these up before you quote anybody.
- Platform cost. A rented reseller tier is a fixed monthly number regardless of client count. A self-hosted licence is paid once, and your ongoing cost is a server bill. This single choice moves your floor more than anything else on the list.
- Developer accounts. Apple charges $99 a year, Google charges $25 once. Decide early whether apps go in the client's accounts or yours — it changes both your cost and who owns the listing.
- Build minutes. Cloud CI time per build. Small per app, not zero, and it scales with how often clients ask for changes.
- AI or feature credits, if the platform meters them.
- Your hours. The honest one. Onboarding, screenshots, store copy, review submissions, the rejection that needs a resubmit. Price the first app you build at your real time and you will quote the second one properly.
Most people skip the last two and discover their margin was thinner than they thought around client five.
Setup fee plus monthly, not one or the other
Charge both. The reasons are structural, not greedy.
The setup fee pays for the work that only happens once. Store accounts, icon and splash, screenshots, the listing text, the first submission and whatever review throws back. That is real labour and it is front-loaded. Give it away and your first month on every client is spent at a loss.
The monthly fee pays for the thing that never stops. Hosting, OS updates, store policy changes, the annual Apple certificate renewal, the client asking for a new tab. Apple and Google both push changes that require a rebuild; somebody has to do it. A one-time build with no retainer means that work arrives unpaid, and you either eat it or the app quietly rots.
The setup fee also filters. A business that will not pay a few hundred up front is usually the business that will cancel in month three and dispute the charge. The fee is cheap qualification.
What you are actually selling
Not an app. The client can get a free DIY builder in an afternoon, and if your pitch is “a mobile app” you will be compared against zero.
You are selling the part they cannot do: an icon on the home screen, push notifications they can send without asking anyone, two store listings that stay compliant, and a person to call. Price against that and the DIY builder stops being the comparison.
Push notifications are usually the single feature that closes the deal. A café that can message yesterday's customers directly, without paying for reach, understands the value immediately in a way that “native app” never conveys.
Three pricing mistakes that cost the most
- Per-build pricing. Charging per app build makes your revenue lumpy and your incentives wrong — you earn when clients churn and resubmit, not when they stay. Recurring revenue is the whole point of this model.
- Discounting to win the first client. Your first price becomes your reference price, and the first client talks to the second. Discount the setup fee if you must; never the monthly.
- Quoting before you know their store situation. A client with no Apple Developer account, a website that fails App Store guideline 4.2, and a brochure site with four pages is a different job from a WooCommerce store with traffic. Look at the site first.
Where the platform choice lands
Run the two models at the same client price. At £99 a month per client against a $599 monthly platform tier, your first six or seven clients fund the platform. Against a self-hosted licence plus hosting, the floor is low from client one and stays flat as you add more.
That does not make renting wrong — it buys you a support desk and somebody else's uptime, which is worth paying for while you are still finding out whether you can close anyone. The full arithmetic, including where renting genuinely wins, is in rent the platform or own it.
What it does mean is that your price to the client and your cost per client are separate decisions, and only one of them is in your control after you sign a platform contract.
Who to sell to at these prices is a different question, and the answer is narrower than “local businesses” — see which small businesses actually buy an app.