An app costs 8.25 USD a month to keep on sale, and everything else is a usage bill.
The only recurring cost of running an app that anybody can quote you is the Apple Developer Program, 99 USD a year, which is 8.25 USD a month if you spread it. Google Play asks for 25 USD once, when you create the account, and never asks again. After that there is no fixed number, because the rest of the bill is usage: a database that charges by the hour it is awake, storage that charges by the gigabyte, email that charges by the message, and a store commission that only exists once something sells. Both store figures were read from Apple's and Google's own pages on 16 October 2026. The one off side of this, the fees you meet before you are live, is covered in what it costs to publish an app.
What follows is the fixed part with the figures and the date they were checked, what actually happens to a live app when the membership lapses, which lines grow with your user count, and why month two always costs more than month one. Then the honest largest line, which is not on any invoice.
See what is actually fixedThe short version
Three layers, and only the thin one is fixed.
Layer one is the store fees. They are small, they are published, and they do not care how your month went. Layer two is whatever your app sends off the phone: accounts, synced data, uploaded files, outbound email, model calls. Those bills start near zero and grow with the number of people using the thing. Layer three is the cut the stores take when money changes hands, which is zero in a month with no sales.
Most people get this backwards. They worry about layer one, which works out at the price of a sandwich, and ignore layer two, which is the one that can go from nothing to a real number in a week because one screen got popular. An app with no server has no layer two at all. Knowing which layer each cost sits in tells you what to watch, and it is a better plan than any monthly estimate somebody gives you for an app they have not seen.
What are the fixed costs of keeping an app live?
Two, and only one of them repeats. Apple's own enrollment page, read on 16 October 2026, says the Apple Developer Program annual fee is 99 USD and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program annual fee is 299 USD, in local currency where available. It adds that prices may vary by region and are listed in local currency during the enrollment process, so the figure on your invoice may not be exactly 99 of your own currency units. The page carries no last updated date of its own, which is why the date it was read matters. Accredited educational institutions worldwide can enroll with a fee waiver.
Google's side is a one off. Its help page for creating a developer account, read the same day, says there is a US$25 one time registration fee. One payment, for the life of the account, covering as many apps as you publish. The page also sets out identity verification, where you may be asked for a valid government ID and a credit card, both in your legal name, and warns that if the identity information you submit is judged invalid the registration fee will not be refunded. That is the only way the 25 USD can cost you twice.
Put the two together and the arithmetic is dull in a good way. Both stores in your first year come to 124 USD. Every year after that is 99 USD, which is 8.25 USD a month. An Android only app pays 25 USD once and then nothing. There is no per app fee on either store, so the fixed cost of your fifth app is the same as the fixed cost of your first, and that is the single strongest argument for keeping one developer account rather than one per idea.
Note what is not on this list. Apple says that with just an Apple Account you can use Xcode, the documentation, the forums and Feedback Assistant, and test your apps on your own devices, and that you only need to enroll if you want to distribute apps, use beta software, or integrate capabilities such as Siri, Apple Pay and iCloud. Building and testing costs nothing. The 99 USD buys the right to put the result in front of strangers.
Apple, Apple Developer Program enrollment and fees, read 16 October 2026
Google Play Console Help, create a Google Play developer account, read 16 October 2026
What happens to a live app if the membership lapses?
Less than people fear, and more than they can afford. Apple Developer Help, Program Renewal, read on 16 October 2026, says that if your membership expires your apps will no longer be available for download, and you will not be able to submit new apps or updates or access Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles. It also says your apps will still function for users who have already installed or downloaded them, and that you keep access to certain App Store Connect features and the free development resources. Nobody's phone stops working. Your listing just goes quiet.
The expensive half of that sentence is the middle. No submissions means no fix for the crash that showed up on Friday, no response to a review, and no shipping the thing you promised a customer. An app that cannot be updated gets worse by itself as phones and operating systems move on. If you are the kind of person who ships a build every few weeks, work out how your version numbers line up before the renewal date, not after it.
The timing rules reward being early and do not punish you for it. Apple says you can renew manually starting 30 days before the expiration date, or any time after it, and that renewing while the membership is still active takes effect when the current one expires. You lose no days by paying early. Automatic renewal through the Apple Developer website only works in certain regions, with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia among those listed, so a developer outside them should treat this as a calendar entry rather than a standing order. Enrolling through the Apple Developer app makes it an auto renewable subscription instead.
Recovery is quick and slightly different for paid apps. Apple says a renewal completed after expiry activates when you finish the process, and that free apps you had available for download become available again within 24 hours. Paid apps come back once the account holder signs in to App Store Connect and accepts the Paid Applications Agreement, and you do not need to resubmit. Google Play has no equivalent cliff, because the registration fee never comes due again, though the policy work of keeping an Android listing compliant does not stop.
Apple, Apple Developer Program enrollment and fees, read 16 October 2026
Which costs grow when more people use the app?
Every cost that starts the moment data leaves the phone. An app that keeps its data locally has no second layer: no accounts, no server, no bill. Add sign in and you are paying per person. Add synced data and you are paying for a database, by volume and by the hours it is awake. Add uploads and you are paying for storage. Add email and you are paying per message. Add a model call behind a button and you are paying per call and per length of call. Nobody can price those for you, because they depend on your provider and on how many people open the app.
Two properties matter more than the rate. The first is whether the bill falls again. Calls, messages and bandwidth all drop in a quiet month. Storage does not, because people do not go back and delete their photos, so that line ratchets upward and stays there. The second is whether you pay while nobody is using it. A rented server costs the same at three in the morning as it does at lunchtime, while a per request service costs nothing overnight. For a small app with a few hundred users, that one choice is usually the difference between a bill you forget about and a bill you notice.
Free tiers are the reason month one lies to you. Most providers give away a band at the bottom that a new app sits inside comfortably, which is correct and generous and tells you nothing about month six. The number worth working out is the bill at ten times your current users, because that is the month you will be too busy to notice it. None of this is a problem if the app earns, which makes the plan for app monetisation part of the running cost question rather than a separate one.
The store side of layer two is genuinely nothing. Google's registration fee is one time, so a published Android app costs the store nothing to keep listed, and Google Play Console Help on service fees, read on 16 October 2026, says 97% of developers distribute their apps and take advantage of all Google Play has to offer at no charge. Apple's 99 USD a year covers as many apps as you ship. When a running cost gets uncomfortable, it is almost never the stores doing it.
Google Play Console Help, create a Google Play developer account, read 16 October 2026
Build your bill
What your live app is billing you for
Tick what is true of your app today. Each line tells you who sends the bill and what shape it is, because the shape matters more than the number.
Nothing ticked. An app that keeps its data on the phone, takes no money and is not on the App Store costs nothing at all to run. That is a real answer, and it is where most apps start.
Why does month two cost more than month one?
Because month one is the month you paid to get in, and month two is the first month you pay to stay. In month one the usage bills sit inside their free bands, nothing has sold, and the work was building. In month two there are users, so there is a crash to chase, a support email to answer, a dependency that wants upgrading, and at least one update to ship. None of that appeared on a price list anywhere.
Commission arrives in month two for the same reason. It is the one cost that is proportional to good news. Apple's Small Business Program page, read on 16 October 2026, describes a reduced commission rate of 15% on paid apps and Apple in app purchases, available to developers who made up to 1 million USD in proceeds in the prior calendar year and to developers new to the App Store, and says that once a participating developer passes that threshold in the current year the standard commission rate applies to future sales. Google charges its service fee on what sells through Play billing. Neither charges anything in a month with no sales.
Updates have a cost that is easy to miss, and it is not the hour you spent on the code. Every submission is a review, and a review can come back refused, which turns a twenty minute change into a week. Reading why apps get rejected before your second submission is cheaper than learning it from a rejection notice. Budget in weeks of calendar time rather than hours of work, especially for anything you have promised a customer by a date.
So the honest monthly figure for a small live app is this. Under ten dollars of store fees. A usage bill that is zero, or close to it, until the app has real users. A commission you only pay on money you have already received. And somewhere between two and ten hours of your own time, which at any sensible rate for your own hours is larger than everything above it put together. Price those hours. It is the only way the number in your head matches the one in your bank.
Apple, Apple Developer Program enrollment and fees, read 16 October 2026
The monthly bill, line by line
| The line | What the documentation fixes | Arrives every month |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Developer Program | 99 USD a year, in local currency where available | No |
| Google Play registration | 25 USD, one time, for the life of the account | No |
| Builder or tooling subscription | 25 USD a month on Newly, stops when you stop building | Yes |
| Backend, storage and email | Nothing published. It is a usage bill with a free band at the bottom | Yes |
| Store commission or service fee | Taken out of sales, so there is nothing to pay when nothing sells | No |
| Your own hours | The biggest line on the page and the only one nobody invoices | Yes |
Where this lands if a builder generated your app
The store fees are yours either way. Apple requires the owner of the app's content to submit it, which is why no builder submits on your behalf, and it is why the 99 USD membership has to sit in your name and not the tool's. A builder subscription is a separate thing from a running cost: it buys changes to the app, not the app's continued existence.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project that you own, with two way GitHub sync, so the code sits in your repository from the first day. It uploads iOS builds to TestFlight, publishes to Google Play internal testing, and builds a standalone Android APK. It is $25 a month with no free tier. Stop paying and the live app carries on exactly as it was, because nothing of yours is hosted by the builder. What you give up is the quick way to change it.
Where a generated app starts is the useful part for this question. A new one is local first: data on the phone, no accounts, no server, which means no layer two and a true running cost of 8.25 USD a month. That changes the moment you ask for sign in, shared data or payments, because then there is a backend and the meter starts. Ask for the feature knowing which bill it opens, and the monthly number stops being a surprise.
Questions people ask about what an app costs to run
There is no monthly plan. Apple's enrollment page, read on 16 October 2026, says the Apple Developer Program annual fee is 99 USD and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program annual fee is 299 USD, in local currency where available, and that prices may vary by region and are listed in local currency during enrollment. Spread over twelve months, the ordinary membership is 8.25 USD a month. Accredited educational institutions worldwide can enroll with a fee waiver. That one figure is the whole of your fixed, published, recurring store cost on iOS.
Write the bill down before you build the app
List what leaves the phone, then list who bills you for each of those. Keep the first version local and the monthly cost stays at the price of the membership, which is a good place to start from.
Start building