Freelance iOS and Android MVP pricing in Europe
What the rates actually are across Europe, how they compare against India and the US, and how to read a quote instead of just comparing numbers.
Shailendra Kumar Ram
If you are pricing an MVP and comparing European developers, you will find plenty of ranges and almost no explanation. A UK agency quotes twenty to sixty thousand pounds. A freelancer in Eastern Europe quotes a fifth of that. Both numbers are real, and neither one tells you what yours will cost.
The spread is not mostly about skill. It comes down to where the work happens, who absorbs the risk, and above all how tightly the scope has been defined. This covers all three, so you can read a quote rather than just compare it against the others.
What Europe actually costs
Rates vary more within Europe than most founders expect, and the gap between regions is wider than the gap between a freelancer and a small agency in the same city.
- Eastern Europe, freelance: roughly 20 to 55 dollars an hour, with senior iOS rates drifting upward as demand outpaces supply.
- Eastern Europe, agency: roughly 50 to 100 dollars an hour.
- UK, freelance: roughly 20 to 50 pounds an hour.
- France and comparable Western European markets: roughly 30 to 60 dollars an hour freelance.
- Western Europe and North America, agency: 60 to 150 dollars an hour and upward.
In project terms, a mobile MVP with a UK agency lands between 20,000 and 60,000 pounds, and a simple single-platform iOS MVP sits nearer 18,000 to 40,000. The same written specification costs very different amounts outside Europe, which is the next section.
Why the same MVP varies fivefold
Three things drive it, and only one of them is geography.
The first is overhead. An agency price carries project management, sales, account handling and a bench of people. Some of that you are genuinely buying, continuity in particular: if one person leaves, the work continues. A freelance price carries almost none of it, which is why it is lower and also why it stops when that person is ill.
The second is who absorbs uncertainty. A fixed price includes a margin for everything nobody has thought of yet. An hourly rate does not, because you are carrying that risk instead. An hourly quote will always look cheaper on the day you sign it, which is not the day that matters.
The third, and by a distance the largest, is what the two of you each think MVP means.
Your definition of MVP is the real price
The word MVP does more damage to budgets than any rate card. Two founders using it in the same sentence routinely mean different products.
One means the smallest thing that tests whether anybody wants this. Sign in, the single core action, a way to pay. Four to six weeks, one platform, deliberately unfinished at the edges.
The other means the first version of the real product: onboarding, settings, notifications, an admin view, analytics, and enough polish that it does not look like a prototype. That is three to four times the work, and it is what most people are picturing when they say the word.
Before you collect a single quote, write down the one thing your app has to prove and the shortest path a user can take to prove it. Everything off that path is version two. This exercise moves budgets further than any negotiation over hourly rate, and it costs you an afternoon.
Building both platforms at once is usually the wrong first move
The instinct is to launch on iOS and Android together. For an MVP that is usually the expensive instinct.
Two native apps is close to two builds. Cross-platform frameworks such as Flutter and React Native cut that meaningfully, commonly by 30 to 50 percent against two native codebases, and for an app that is mostly screens, forms and network calls the saving is real with little downside.
There is one exception worth knowing if your product touches hardware. Anything talking to a Bluetooth device, a camera pipeline or background sensors tends to cost more in a cross-platform framework rather than less. You inherit a wrapper library's bugs on top of the platform's own, and when something fails at the device layer you are debugging through an extra abstraction. On that kind of work the usual advice is to write the device layer natively even when the interface is not.
For most MVPs the cheaper path is one platform, chosen by where your first users actually are, with the second added once the idea has been proven.
India and the US, for comparison
Europe sits in the middle of a much wider global range. If you are collecting quotes from more than one region, the two ends are worth knowing.
- India, agency: roughly 20 to 65 dollars an hour, with juniors at 15 to 25, mid-level at 25 to 45 and seniors at 45 to 65. Specialist roles reach about 85.
- India, freelance: commonly 30 to 40 percent below the equivalent agency rate.
- United States, agency: roughly 100 to 200 dollars an hour, or 120 to 220 once fully loaded.
- United States, freelance: a very wide band, with a senior median near 145 dollars an hour and genuine specialists well above it.
In project terms the gap is large and consistent. A basic MVP quoted around 18,000 dollars in India is commonly 75,000 in the UK and 110,000 in the US. A six month medium-complexity build runs 144,000 to 216,000 with a US team against 26,000 to 45,000 with a senior Indian agency. India generally sits 60 to 70 percent below US rates, and 30 to 40 percent below Eastern Europe at equivalent seniority.
What the gap does and does not buy you
The saving is mostly salary arithmetic rather than a quality discount, and it is worth being precise about that, because both the sales pitch and the suspicion around it tend to be overstated.
The best offshore teams ship work indistinguishable from a US or UK team. What differs is the floor, not the ceiling.
A wider range of quality is the real trade, which means the cost of choosing badly is higher, not that the ceiling is lower. Reference checks and a small paid trial matter more at the lower end of the range, not less. What you are otherwise trading is:
- Timezone overlap. A team five to nine hours ahead of you has finished its day as yours begins. That is good for throughput and bad for a fast decision loop, unless overlap hours are agreed in writing before you start.
- Communication cost. Written specifications carry more weight when nobody is in the room. That is often a benefit in disguise, because it forces exactly the scope discipline described above.
- Continuity. A solo freelancer anywhere stops when they are ill. An agency anywhere charges you for the insurance against that. This is a structural question, not a regional one.
What the gap does not buy is a different standard of engineering, and a quote implying otherwise in either direction is selling you something.
Using the spread deliberately
For an MVP the decision is less about region than about two things: whether the person has shipped your specific kind of app before, and whether the scope is written down. A senior developer in any of these markets who has built your kind of product will beat a cheaper generalist anywhere, because on a six week build the schedule is dominated by what somebody already knows rather than by their hourly rate.
One sensible way to use the range is to pay senior rates for the thinking, meaning architecture, scope and the genuinely hard parts, and lower rates for the volume, meaning screens, forms and routine integration. Splitting the work by difficulty travels better than picking one region and hoping it covers everything.
Hourly, fixed price or retainer
Each model is right for a different stage, and using the wrong one is a common way to overpay.
- Hourly suits work whose scope genuinely cannot be pinned down yet, such as a discovery phase or an audit of an existing codebase. You carry the risk of it running long, so agree a cap.
- Fixed price suits a defined build with a written scope. You pay a margin for certainty, and you should expect a documented change process for anything outside that scope rather than an argument about it.
- Retainer suits the period after launch, when the work is a steady stream of fixes, store updates and small features rather than a project with an end.
A sensible and common shape is a short paid discovery at a day rate, ending in a written scope, followed by a fixed price for the build. You get a real number instead of an estimate, and the person quoting has read your requirements before committing to them.
How to tell a real quote from a guess
- A real quote arrives after questions. If nobody asked what your app has to prove, who the first users are, or what happens on the unhappy paths, nothing was estimated.
- It names what is excluded. Design, backend, store accounts, third party service costs and post-launch support are the usual omissions, and they reappear later as invoices.
- It says what happens when the scope changes, because it will change.
- It gives a range with reasons attached, rather than one number with none.
A quote dramatically below the others is rarely a bargain. It is usually a different and smaller scope that nobody has written down, and the difference surfaces in month three when you are too committed to walk away.
If you are comparing regions
Set against each other, a Warsaw freelancer, a London agency and an offshore team differ on four axes at once: rate, overhead, overlap and who absorbs risk when something goes wrong.
Rate is the least important of the four on a small project. On a six week build, the difference between a developer who has shipped this kind of app before and one who has not is measured in weeks of schedule, not in hourly rate. A cheaper developer who takes three months has cost you more than an expensive one who took six weeks, before you count the three months you did not spend selling.
The question is not who is cheapest per hour. It is who will finish, and what happens to your product if they stop.
If you have quotes in hand and want a second read on what they actually include, or a scope written down properly before you go out to price it, that is usually a short conversation and a useful one.