How much does it cost to build an app like One Medical?
Estimated US development cost, the features and surfaces involved, the team and timeline it takes, the infrastructure it needs at scale, and what it costs to run once it is live.
A membership-based primary care service with its own clinics and an app that ties them together. Members book same-day or next-day appointments, message their care team, hold virtual visits, and see their records. The app is the front door to a physical care network rather than a standalone digital product.
What this build involves
Membership primary care- Features listed
- 33
- Sides served
- 4
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Sensitivity
- 5/5
The calculator returns
It is not one app — it is 4
The most common reason a budget for something like this comes in low is counting one application when the product needs several, plus the shared platform underneath that nobody sees.
Applications people use — 4
Member app
iOS · Android · Web
Members
Booking, virtual visits, messaging, records, membership and billing.
Clinic & care team console
Web · Desktop · Tablet
Providers and front desk
Schedules across locations, room and provider capacity, message triage, charting.
Employer portal
Web
Benefits teams
Sponsored memberships, eligibility, utilisation and invoicing.
Network operations
Web
Operations and compliance
Capacity planning across clinics, quality metrics, audit and access control.
Shared platform underneath — 11
Backend & API
The shared data model, business rules and the API every side reads and writes through. Built once, and the single largest line in almost every estimate.
Identity & permissions
Sign-in, sessions, second factors and a role model enforced on the server. Multi-sided products need one identity system that understands several kinds of user.
Payments & money movement
Charging, refunding, paying out, reconciling and surviving audit. Never just an SDK call — the ledger and the failure paths are the work.
Notification system
Templating, preferences, delivery across push, email and SMS, retries, and the suppression rules that stop a product becoming spam.
Location & mapping
Map rendering, geocoding, routing and live position ingestion. Metered by the provider, so architecture decisions here show up on the monthly bill.
Real-time transport
Persistent connections, presence, fan-out and reconnection. A separate scaling problem from the request/response API, with its own capacity model.
Media pipeline
Upload, transcode, storage, delivery and the CDN in front of it. Egress is usually the largest single running cost in a media product.
AI services & governance
Model access, retrieval over your own content, evaluation and guardrails. The governance half is the part that gets cut and then rebuilt after an incident.
Admin & operations console
Where your own staff fix what customers cannot: account issues, refunds, overrides, escalations. Consistently underbudgeted, and consistently the reason support costs balloon.
Analytics & reporting
Event instrumentation, a warehouse and the dashboards the business actually runs on. Retrofitting instrumentation costs several times what building it in does.
Infrastructure & delivery
Environments, pipelines, secrets, monitoring, alerting and on-call. The work that makes everything above deployable more than once a month.
What has to be built
Split by the phase each capability realistically lands in. The MVP column is priced as its own configuration above, so the split is a real costing decision rather than a diagram.
MVP features
13The smallest set that is still this product.
- Email & password sign-in
- Multi-factor authentication
- User profiles
- Consent & authorisation records
- Availability & booking calendar
- Compliant secure messaging
- Video calling
- Documents & file handling
- Push notifications
- SMS notifications
- Subscriptions & recurring billing
- Card payments
- Audit logging
Advanced features
11What a credible competitor is expected to have.
- Recurring bookings
- Waitlists & overbooking
- Roles & permissions
- Maps & places
- Notification centre
- Ratings & reviews
- Search, filters & sorting
- Dashboards & reporting
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)
- E-signature
- Transaction history & statements
Enterprise features
9Scale, governance and the work nobody demos.
- Enterprise SSO (SAML / OIDC)
- Admin console
- Organisations & team accounts
- Self-service report builder
- Scheduled exports & feeds
- Approval workflows
- Support tooling
- Feature flags & remote config
- Anomaly detection
The same features, by who uses them
Customer experience
What the people you are building for actually touch.
- Email & password sign-in
- Multi-factor authentication
- User profiles
- Consent & authorisation records
- Documents & file handling
- Subscriptions & recurring billing
- Card payments
- Audit logging
- Roles & permissions
- E-signature
- Transaction history & statements
- Enterprise SSO (SAML / OIDC)
- Organisations & team accounts
Communication
How the product reaches people and how they reach each other.
- Compliant secure messaging
- Video calling
- Push notifications
- SMS notifications
- Notification centre
Field & location
Everything that happens away from a desk.
- Maps & places
Operations & staff
The consoles your own team lives in. Rarely demoed, always needed.
- Availability & booking calendar
- Recurring bookings
- Waitlists & overbooking
- Ratings & reviews
- Admin console
- Approval workflows
- Support tooling
Data & intelligence
Reporting, analysis and anything model-driven.
- Search, filters & sorting
- Dashboards & reporting
- Self-service report builder
- Scheduled exports & feeds
- Anomaly detection
Platform
The cross-cutting obligations — access, languages, configuration.
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)
- Feature flags & remote config
Technology a build like this would use
Derived from the platforms and capabilities above.
These are typical choices for building a product of this shape today. They are derived from the platforms and capabilities described above — not a claim about what One Medical actually runs on. We do not publish other companies’ internal technology, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.
Mobile
- React Native or Flutter (one codebase)
- Swift / SwiftUI (native iOS)
- Kotlin / Jetpack Compose (native Android)
Two native codebases buy platform fidelity and cost roughly 66–70% more on the client than one shared codebase. Cross-platform is the default unless a specific capability forces native.
Web
- TypeScript
- React with Next.js
- Tailwind CSS or a component library
Server rendering matters here if the pages need to be indexed; if the web surface is an authenticated console only, it does not.
Backend
- Node.js or Go for the real-time edge
- Python or Java for domain services
- gRPC or REST between services
A real-time product usually ends up with two server profiles: a connection-handling tier tuned for many idle sockets, and a conventional application tier behind it.
Data
- PostgreSQL (primary transactional store)
- Redis (cache, sessions, queues)
One relational database plus a cache covers more products than teams expect. Add a specialist store when a real query pattern demands it, not in anticipation.
Cloud & delivery
- AWS, Google Cloud or Azure
- Containers on a managed orchestrator
- Terraform or equivalent for infrastructure as code
- GitHub Actions or similar for CI/CD
The architecture tier this product needs is driven by traffic, not preference — see the scale section below.
Payments
- Stripe, Adyen or Braintree
- Apple Pay and Google Pay via the platform SDKs
- Reconciliation against processor settlement reports
Using a processor keeps card data out of your systems and shrinks PCI scope dramatically. It does not remove the need for your own reconciliation.
Maps & location
- Google Maps Platform
- Mapbox
- Provider geocoding
Map providers meter by request. Caching geocodes, batching route calls and choosing static over interactive maps where possible has a direct monthly cost effect.
Messaging & notifications
- APNs and FCM for push, usually via a delivery service
- Twilio for SMS and voice
- SES, SendGrid or Resend for email
Deliverability is an operational discipline: warm-up, domain authentication, bounce handling and suppression lists. It is not solved by picking a vendor.
Video
- LiveKit, Daily or Agora for real-time calls
- WebRTC directly if you have the expertise
Building video transport in-house is a multi-year specialism. Buy the transport; spend your engineering on the product around it.
AI
- A hosted model provider (Anthropic, OpenAI) or Bedrock
- Prompt and context management
- Evaluation harness and output guardrails
Token cost scales with usage, so unit economics need modelling before launch. The evaluation and guardrail layer is what separates a demo from a product.
Observability
- Sentry for errors
- Datadog, Grafana or an equivalent for metrics and traces
- Structured logging with retention matched to your compliance regime
Instrumentation is cheapest when added during the build. Retrofitting it after the first production incident costs several times more.
How an app like One Medical works
The distinguishing engineering problem is that the digital and physical experiences must be one system. A member messaging their provider at midnight and walking into a clinic at nine should meet the same record, the same care team and the same billing relationship. That means the app sits on top of a clinical record, a real-estate-bound scheduling system, a membership billing system and an employer channel — and the seams between them are exactly where the product either feels premium or falls apart.
In costing terms that shape matters more than the feature count. A booking & scheduling in healthcare inherits obligations before anyone designs a screen — this sector rates 5 out of 5 for regulatory and procurement difficulty on this site, and that rating is what drives the security posture, the audit work and the integration surface any estimate has to carry.
MVP versus the full product
A first version of this is a materially smaller build than the mature product, and the calculator will show you by how much. It gets there by shipping fewer features, on fewer surfaces, at a launch-sized audience rather than the traffic the mature product carries.
What it does not cut is compliance. A regulated product is regulated from its first user, so the primary regime stays in the MVP even though almost everything else is deferred. Teams that defer it discover that retrofitting audit logging, access control and data retention costs several times what building them in would have.
Monetisation
How products of this shape make money
- Annual membership fees
- Insurance reimbursement for visits
- Employer-sponsored membership contracts
Generic to the category, not a description of One Medical’s commercial arrangements.
What these numbers are, and are not
This page carries no figures deliberately. What it sets out is the shape of the build — the sides, the tiers, the stack, the compliance — because that is what an estimate is derived from and what you can check. The calculator turns your own version of that shape into a planning estimate with a stated confidence band; use it to decide the order of magnitude, then spend two to four weeks on a technical specification and get a real quote against that document.
Nothing here is a statement about One Medical as a company. We do not know and do not publish what any business spent building its product, what it earns, how many people it employs, or what technology it runs on. What we describe is the product shape any user can observe — the surfaces it presents, the roles it serves, the capabilities it evidently has — and what building that shape would cost in the United States today.
Building an app like One Medical, answered
How much does it cost to build an app like One Medical?
There is no one figure, because "an app like One Medical" covers three very different builds: a first version with only the essential features, a complete and credible competitor, and a rebuild of everything the mature product does at the traffic it carries. Those are several-fold apart. What this page gives you is the shape of each — the sides, the feature tiers, the stack and the compliance — and the calculator turns whichever one you actually mean into a cost range, hours and a timeline.
Why is an app like One Medical more expensive than a typical app?
Because it is not one app. It is 4 separate applications — member app, clinic & care team console, employer portal, network operations — sharing one backend, each with its own design, release cycle and test matrix. Most quotes that come in low have counted one of them. Capacity is physical: Scheduling has to respect rooms, equipment, provider licences and travel between locations, not just a calendar. Same-day availability as a promise means modelling real clinic capacity accurately enough to sell against it.
Could I build a cheaper version first?
Yes, and you should. A first version ships the essential feature tier rather than all three, on fewer surfaces, at a launch-sized audience — materially less than the full product, and the calculator will show you by how much. What it does not cut is compliance: healthcare obligations apply from the first user, so those stay in whatever else is deferred.
How long would it take to build?
It depends on the same three things the cost does — which tier of the product you mean, how many surfaces you ship, and how settled the scope is. The calculator returns a timeline alongside the cost, derived the same way: hours divided across a realistic team shape, never a target date worked backwards from.
What does it cost to run once it is live?
Cloud infrastructure, third-party services and annual maintenance, and the calculator reports all three separately from the build. They are kept out of the build figure deliberately: they are operating expenditure rather than capital, and adding the two together produces a number that means nothing. Maintenance in particular is not optional — an app that receives none stops working within about a year as OS releases and SDK deprecations accumulate.
Are these real figures for One Medical?
This page carries no figures at all, and nobody outside the company has real ones. What it describes is the product SHAPE, observed from what any user can see — the sides, the feature tiers, the stack, the compliance. Nothing here describes what One Medical actually spent, earns, employs or runs on. The calculator prices building something of that shape today, for the United States market, at our own blended delivery rate.
Does my healthcare app need to be HIPAA compliant?
Only if you handle protected health information as a covered entity or on behalf of one. A fitness tracker you sell directly to consumers generally is not in scope. A patient portal for a clinic, an app a provider gives to patients, or anything where you sign a business associate agreement absolutely is. The distinction is about your relationship with the provider, not the type of data — and it should be settled before you design your data model, because retrofitting HIPAA controls costs several times what building with them costs.
What does EHR integration actually cost?
A single HL7 v2 interface through an integration engine is $30,000–$70,000. A FHIR R4 API layer is $45,000–$90,000. An Epic or Oracle Health app-program integration runs $60,000–$160,000 and is gated by their onboarding and review timeline rather than your engineering speed, so it belongs on the critical path from day one. Read-only access is dramatically cheaper than write-back, and starting read-only is usually the right call.
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Products with a comparable shape. Each has its own breakdown.
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