Fintech founders get used to a frustrating pattern: ask an agency for a price, and the answer is "it depends" followed by silence. It genuinely does depend — but on specific, answerable things, not on how long the agency can stretch a discovery process. Here is the honest breakdown we'd give a friend.
The three tiers of fintech apps
Tier 1 — Personal finance & budgeting apps (roughly $8,000–$18,000). Expense tracking, budget categories, spending insights, maybe a bank-feed connection through an aggregator API. No custody of funds, no lending, no licensing complexity. Timeline: 6–10 weeks.
Tier 2 — Billing, invoicing and payment-enabled apps (roughly $15,000–$35,000). This is where invoicing software and payment gateway integration live — multi-currency billing, Stripe/PayPal subscriptions, recurring payments, financial reporting dashboards. Real money moves through these, so precision and security work harder than in Tier 1.
Tier 3 — Lending, wallets and multi-party platforms (roughly $35,000–$100,000+). Fintech apps that hold balances, calculate interest or amortization, split payments across multiple parties, or move toward regulated territory. These need the most engineering rigor and, usually, your own legal and licensing work running in parallel.
What actually drives the price up
Not the number of screens — screens are cheap. What costs money: financial precision (every calculation done in fixed-point arithmetic, never floating-point, because a rounding error that's invisible in a demo becomes a real discrepancy at scale), security posture (encryption, MFA, audit logs on every financial action), bank or aggregator API integrations, and multi-currency support done properly rather than as an afterthought.
The questions that decide your tier
Before anyone can quote you honestly, they need answers to: Does the app ever hold customer funds, even briefly? Does it connect to users' bank accounts? Does it operate in more than one currency or country? Does it calculate interest, returns, or amortization? Your answers place you in a tier faster than any generic feature checklist.
How we quote it
Every project gets a free scoping call, then a fixed price against a written deliverables checklist — not an hourly estimate that grows with the project. Payment runs through escrow: you fund the agreed amount, we build, you test it against real scenarios, and payment releases only once you approve it. Whether you're in Dubai, London, or Toronto, quotes are in USD and delivery is fully remote.