16 sectors
App development cost by industry
Who you serve sets your obligations before you write a feature: which compliance regimes apply, which systems of record you will be asked to integrate with, how many distinct roles touch the workflow, and how sensitive the data is. Those are the things that make the same product cost twice as much in one sector as another.
Regulated
The regulator, not the feature list, sets the budget.
Audit logging, access controls, encryption key management, retention and deletion policy, and business associate agreements all have to be built and then maintained. Expect 15–25% of a healthcare build to be compliance engineering that produces no user-visible feature.
Money systems must reconcile exactly, always. Double-entry ledgers, idempotent transaction handling, settlement windows and daily reconciliation are unglamorous and non-negotiable, and they are where fintech engineering budgets actually go.
Premium calculation is state-specific, filed with regulators and changes regularly. Either you integrate a rating engine or you build a configurable rules engine — and the second is a genuine product in its own right, not a feature.
Section 508 and ADA conformance are contractual obligations with real consequences, not best-effort goals. Building to WCAG 2.2 AA from the start adds 8–12%; retrofitting it later costs several times that and often requires redesign.
Commerce
Software that exists to complete a transaction.
The buying experience is the visible tenth. Inventory accuracy, order state machines, partial shipments, returns, refunds, tax and carrier integration are where retail engineering budgets actually go.
A single restaurant’s ordering app is one product. A delivery marketplace is three — customer, restaurant and courier — over one backend, and the courier app is the hardest of the three because it runs for hours in the background streaming location.
Your own inventory is straightforward. Third-party inventory means caching, revalidation, rate limits, price drift and failed bookings. GDS connectivity for flights adds certification and fare rules and is a specialist multi-quarter programme.
MLS access is granted per market, requires a participating broker and comes with display rules you must follow. Each MLS has its own schema, so the first feed is $30,000–$60,000 and each additional market $15,000–$35,000 — mostly normalisation.
Operations
Software that coordinates people, vehicles and machines.
Drivers and warehouse staff lose signal constantly. Every capture — scan, signature, photo, status change — must queue locally and reconcile without duplicating or losing work. Offline-first is 2–3× the cost of the equivalent always-connected feature, and it is not optional.
Industrial protocols — Modbus, OPC-UA, PROFINET — and the gateways that bridge them are specialist work, and plant networks are usually air-gapped or tightly segmented. The integration is rarely the hard part; getting network access approved is.
Smart meters at 15-minute intervals produce 96 readings per meter per day. A million meters is 96 million readings daily, which is a data engineering problem with a customer portal attached rather than the reverse.
Professional obligations require ethical walls between matters, granular access control and defensible audit trails. Permission modelling here is closer to healthcare than to typical B2B software.
Product & audience
Where the software is the product and adoption is the constraint.
Tenant isolation is a constraint on every query, cache key, background job and test, not a feature you add. A missed tenant filter is a breach rather than a bug, which raises the security and QA bar across the whole system.
Video is a recurring cost, not a build cost. Expect $0.005–$0.01 per minute delivered plus storage and transcoding. Twenty thousand learners watching forty minutes a month is $4,000–$8,000 monthly in delivery alone.
At 1080p you deliver roughly 2GB per hour watched, at $0.02–$0.08 per GB. A hundred thousand hours a month is $4,000–$16,000 in egress alone, and it grows linearly with success. This is why streaming businesses obsess over codecs.
A workout or meditation library is filmed, edited and maintained. That budget is real and sits entirely outside a development estimate — teams routinely forget it and then have an app with nothing in it.
Price a build in your sector
Every control on one page, a live spec sheet beside it, and nothing behind a form.