What does it cost to run an app?
The store fees are small: USD 99 a year to Apple and a one-off USD 25 to Google. Most of the running cost goes on servers and services that grow with your user numbers, and on the work of keeping the app up to date. At Brink Studio, operations and further development start at NOK 5,000 a month, plus the services the app relies on.
Håkon Kjelseth, CTO at Brink Studio
Updated · 6 min read
App Store and Google Play fees and commission
To publish on the App Store, your company needs an Apple Developer Program membership, which costs USD 99 per year. Google Play charges a one-time registration fee of USD 25.
If the app sells digital content, such as a subscription or an extra feature, the stores take a share of every purchase. Apple keeps 30% during a subscriber's first year and 15% once they have paid for a full year. Companies that earned up to USD 1 million on the App Store in the previous calendar year, or that are new to it, can join the App Store Small Business Program and pay 15% from the start.
On 30 June 2026 Google changed its rates for purchases by users in the EEA, the UK and the US. Auto-renewing subscriptions now carry a 10% service fee plus a 5% billing fee. Other markets keep the older structure for now.
About half of QuitNic's sales come from the US, so we track the rates across several markets. We run its paywalls in Superwall, which lets us change prices and layout without shipping a new version of the app.
Hosting, database and storage costs that grow with users
Much of an app lives on a server: user accounts, data and any logic that shouldn't run on the phone. We usually use PostgreSQL for the database and pick the cloud platform that suits the client, Azure or AWS for example. The bill depends on how many people use the app, how much data you store and how much you send back out to phones.
Photos and video are what usually push the cost up. In Unveil, guests upload photos from weddings and parties, and every one of them has to be stored and shown again on a big screen, so storage and bandwidth grow with each event. An app that keeps a bit of text and a few numbers per user can run on a small database for a long time.
Before we build anything, we estimate how many users the app could reach in its first year and what that means for hosting. That figure goes into the estimate.
Third-party services: crash reporting, analytics, payments and AI
Most apps depend on a handful of outside services, and the pricing tends to follow one pattern: a free tier that covers a small app, then charges by usage or by team seats. PostHog, which we use for product analytics, is free up to 1 million events and 5,000 session recordings a month. Sentry, which alerts us to crashes, has a free plan for a single user, and its Team plan starts at USD 29 a month.
Card payments cost a percentage of each transaction. Stripe charges 2.4% plus NOK 2 for Norwegian and EEA cards. Email and text messages sent by the app are normally billed per message or in bundles.
AI features cost money every time they run. Language models are priced by the amount of text going in and out, measured in tokens, and Google publishes its Gemini prices per million tokens. QuitNic's AI coach runs on Gemini, so each conversation has a small cost that rises with the number of active users. We work out a rough monthly figure before building a feature like that.
App maintenance: the update work that comes every year
An app needs regular updates even when nothing new is added. Apple ships a major iOS release every autumn and Google releases new versions of Android. Each time, we test the app on the new version and fix whatever has changed.
The stores set their own deadlines too. Since 28 April 2026, every app uploaded to App Store Connect has to be built with Xcode 26 against the iOS 26 SDK. From 31 August 2026, Google Play requires new apps and updates to target Android 16 (API level 36). Existing apps that target Android 14 or lower can no longer be installed by new users on phones running a newer Android version.
Then there are the libraries the app is built on. We build apps with Expo and React Native, and we test each new Expo release before moving to it. Security patches on the server and in dependencies go in as they come out. Apple and Google review every new version before it reaches users, and we plan a little time for that.
Bug fixes, improvements and support
We have run QuitNic since June 2025 and use the same routine for all our apps. Sentry alerts us when the app crashes and tells us the device, the app version and where in the code it failed. PostHog shows how people use the app, such as how many finish sign-up and which screens they leave from.
That tells us what to fix or improve in the next release. Small fixes are part of the monthly operations work. A new feature or a new flow is a bigger change, which we agree and price on its own.
Users will also write in about logging in, subscriptions and bugs. Decide before launch who answers what. It often works best when the company answers its own customers and we take anything that points to a fault in the app.
Worked example: a year of costs for a small business app
Take a booking app for a hair salon with a few branches, on iOS and Android, with login, notifications and payment for appointments. The appointments happen outside the app, so Apple requires them to be paid by card or Apple Pay. Hosting and the amount of further development vary the most between apps. The first year looks like this:
- Apple Developer Program: USD 99
- Google Play: USD 25, first year only
- Hosting, database and storage: a monthly amount we estimate from expected users and bookings
- Analytics and crash alerts: 1,000 active users sending 100 events each a month comes to 100,000 events, well inside PostHog's free tier
- Card payments: a NOK 600 appointment costs NOK 16.40 in Stripe fees
- Operations and further development with us: from NOK 60,000 a year
- Bigger changes, such as a loyalty scheme: agreed and priced separately
How Brink Studio prices app operations
Operations and further development start at NOK 5,000 a month, excluding VAT. That covers hosting, monitoring, updates and small fixes, and bigger changes are agreed separately. Our pricing page shows what a first version costs.
You can pay for the services the app uses, such as servers, Sentry and Stripe, directly to each provider, or we can pay them and invoice you.
When we estimate a new app or a custom system, the first year of running costs is included, so you know the full cost before you commit.