A low quote for your app looks attractive. But agencies that cut corners on quality charge those costs later through bug fixes, rebuilds, or supplier changes.
Low quotes
You have received quotes. One agency asks €15,000, another €35,000. The scope looks similar. What justifies that difference?
A low price can mean three things: the agency works efficiently, the agency leaves something out of the scope, or the agency cuts corners on quality that only becomes visible later. The first option is rare.
What agencies drop first from a cheap quote:
Quality assurance
Say your app works well at the first delivery. After three months you want to add a new feature. The developer changes the code. Somewhere, in another part of the app, something breaks that worked fine before.
Without automated tests nobody notices this, until a user runs into the bug. With automated tests the system runs a check on all critical functions after every change. Errors are caught before they reach the app store.
That keeps an app stable enough to keep building on three years from now.
At The Next App we write automated tests as standard, in every project. That makes the start more expensive and saves on repair costs later.
AI in app development
Agencies using AI tools to generate code can work faster and quote more competitively. That is not wrong in itself: we also use AI as a tool. The difference is whether AI speeds up the work of a skilled developer or replaces it.
A senior developer reviewing AI output can immediately see whether the generated code is structurally sound: whether it is maintainable, fits the architecture, and contains no hidden vulnerabilities. A junior developer who blindly generates and accepts cannot.
There is a name for this now: vibe-coding, generating code by feel without the knowledge to assess the output. It works until a year later you want to add a feature and the codebase turns out to be a patchwork of poorly connected pieces.
So with every quote, also ask who writes and reviews the code, and how the agency uses AI in its process.
Are tests written?
Automated tests are the first cost item to disappear from cheap quotes. Ask explicitly which parts are tested and how.
Who reviews the code?
AI tools speed up the work, but only a senior developer can assess the output for maintainability and architecture.
Is the price per phase fixed?
A fixed price per phase prevents surprises. Also ask what is not included: design, publication and project management are sometimes billed separately.
From practice
Move4U had an app built by a foreign outsourcing party. The collaboration did not go as expected. After analysis we advised a complete rebuild in Flutter. The total investment, including the rebuild, was comparable to what a careful first build would have cost, only without the problems and delays in between.
Accent Advies came to us after their previous supplier stopped while the app was still not functioning properly. After analysis, a full rebuild was faster than repair. We rebuilt the app in Flutter with an offline-first architecture.
Hoogstraten Fotografie faced the same situation: the existing supplier stopped. We rebuilt the Fotostudio application in Flutter, now running on Windows and Mac with automatic synchronisation.
Previous work
The long term
An app without a solid testing foundation looks cheaper until the first major update goes wrong. An app built by an agency without continuity looks cheaper until that agency is gone.
The price of an app is the sum of all costs over its entire lifetime: build, bug fixing, maintenance, further development. A simple app starts at €10,000; an app with a backend quickly reaches €20,000 to €35,000. For a full overview, see our app development costs page.
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