App design in the UK typically costs between £3,000 and £75,000, with most serious projects landing between £10,000 and £30,000. A simple app with a handful of screens sits at the bottom of that range; a complex, multi-platform product with deep user research and a full design system sits at the top. Below is a full breakdown of what each band buys you, what pushes a quote up or down, and the real fixed prices we publish at Digiruu so you can benchmark any quote you receive.
How much does app design cost in the UK?
For a UK agency in 2026, expect to pay £3,000–£15,000 for a simple app design, £10,000–£30,000 for a standard app, and £25,000–£75,000+ for a complex one. If you only need custom UI/UX design — no strategy phase, no build — typical UK market rates land at £6,000–£18,000. A full MVP build, meaning design and working software, typically runs £15,000–£50,000.
These are typical UK market rates gathered from published 2026 cost guides, not a single agency’s price list. Freelancers will quote below them. Large consultancies will quote well above them. The band that matters is the one that matches your app’s actual complexity, and complexity is mostly a function of how many things your app does and how many systems it has to talk to.
What are the UK price bands for app design by complexity?
| Complexity | Typical UK cost | What it usually covers | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple | £3,000–£15,000 | 10–20 screens, one platform, standard patterns, light or no research, no custom design system | 3–6 weeks |
| Standard | £10,000–£30,000 | 25–50 screens, iOS and Android, user flows, user research, reusable component library, prototype | 6–12 weeks |
| Complex | £25,000–£75,000+ | 50+ screens, multi-platform, multiple user roles, admin dashboards, integrations, full design system, accessibility work | 12–20+ weeks |
| UI/UX design only | £6,000–£18,000 | Visual and interaction design applied to an already-defined scope | 4–10 weeks |
| Full MVP build | £15,000–£50,000 | Design plus working, shippable software | 3–6 months |
For comparison, here is what we actually charge at Digiruu — published, fixed, and not adjusted after you have signed:
| Digiruu tier | Price | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Blueprint (Starter) | £12,000 fixed | Discovery, requirements definition and full scope — the document that makes every later quote accurate |
| Pro | £30,000 fixed | Blueprint plus full UX and UI design |
| Max | From £75,000 | Blueprint, design and full build |
What actually drives app design cost up or down?
Six factors account for almost all the variance between an £8,000 quote and a £45,000 one.
Feature count and screen count
This is the single biggest driver. Design effort scales with unique screens and states, not with your app idea’s ambition. An app with 15 screens and one user type is a fundamentally different job from one with 60 screens, three user roles and an admin panel. Onboarding, empty states, error states, loading states and edge cases are all screens too — and they are where cheap quotes quietly cut corners.
Number of platforms
iOS-only is the cheapest starting point. Adding Android rarely doubles the cost, because the core flows are shared, but it commonly adds 20–40% to account for platform conventions, component differences and additional handoff specs. Adding a responsive web app or tablet layouts adds again.
Depth of research
Design with no research is cheaper and riskier. Competitor analysis, user interviews, usability testing on prototypes and analytics reviews can add £2,000–£10,000 to a project. That spend usually pays for itself by preventing you from building the wrong thing — the most expensive mistake available to you.
Design system requirements
A one-off set of screens is cheaper than a proper component library with tokens, variants, states and documentation. The design system costs more up front and dramatically reduces the cost of every future feature. If you plan to keep shipping after launch, budget for it.
Revision rounds
Agencies price on an assumed number of revision rounds — typically two or three. Unlimited revisions do not exist at a fixed price unless someone has padded the quote to cover them. Slow or fragmented feedback from your side is one of the most common reasons projects run over.
Integrations and complex logic
Payments, bookings, maps, chat, subscriptions, third-party data, offline modes and role-based permissions all create additional screens, states and rules that need designing. Each meaningful integration typically adds £1,000–£5,000 of design work before a single line of code is written.
Design only, or design and build — what changes?
Design-only projects in the UK typically cost £6,000–£30,000; design plus build typically costs £15,000–£75,000+. The design phase produces a complete, buildable specification: flows, screens, a prototype, and developer handoff. The build phase turns it into working software, and it is almost always the larger number of the two.
Design-only makes sense if you have an in-house engineering team, if you are raising investment and need something tangible to show, or if you want to validate the concept before committing to build costs. Design-and-build makes sense if you have no technical team, because a single accountable party removes the gap where “the design didn’t account for that” arguments live.
A useful rule of thumb, based on the ranges above: design usually accounts for somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total cost of getting an app to launch. If someone quotes you design at 5% of your build budget, they are not designing enough, and the build team will end up making design decisions on your behalf at developer rates.
Fixed price, day rate or hourly — which protects you?
Fixed price protects the client; hourly and day rates protect the supplier. The problem with a day rate or an hourly rate is not the number itself — it is that neither tells you what the project will cost. A day rate is meaningless until you know whether the project takes 20 days or 60, and you will not know that until the work is finished and invoiced.
With a fixed price, the supplier absorbs the risk of estimating wrong. That is why fixed pricing is rarer than it should be: it requires the agency to genuinely understand the scope before quoting. It is also why serious fixed-price work almost always starts with a paid discovery phase — you cannot fix a price against a scope nobody has defined.
This is the honest reason our own Blueprint tier exists at £12,000: it defines requirements and scope precisely enough that the design and build prices afterwards are fixed rather than estimated. If an agency offers you a fixed price for a full build with no discovery, treat the number as a guess.
What should you expect to receive for your money?
Deliverables are the clearest way to compare two quotes that look similar on price.
At £3,000–£15,000 (simple)
- User flows for the core journeys
- 10–20 designed screens for one platform
- A clickable prototype of the main flow
- Basic style guide: colours, type, buttons
- Design files handed over for development
At £10,000–£30,000 (standard)
- Everything above, plus discovery and requirements documentation
- Competitor and user research findings
- 25–50 screens across iOS and Android
- A reusable component library with states and variants
- A high-fidelity interactive prototype suitable for user testing or investor demos
- Developer handoff with specs, assets and annotations
At £25,000–£75,000+ (complex)
- Everything above, plus a documented design system
- Multiple user roles and admin or back-office interfaces
- Usability testing and iteration based on results
- Accessibility review against WCAG standards
- Motion and interaction specifications
- Ongoing design support through the build
If a quote does not list deliverables in this kind of detail, ask for them in writing before you compare it to anything.
How do you budget realistically — and spot a quote that is too cheap?
A workable starting split for a total launch budget is roughly 25–30% for design, 60–65% for build, and 10–15% held back for post-launch fixes and iteration. The last portion is the one people forget, and it is the one that decides whether your app improves after launch or simply sits there. If that maths leaves you unable to afford a standard-complexity app, the right response is to cut scope, not to cut quality. A well-designed app doing three things is far more valuable than a badly designed one doing twelve.
Warning signs that a quote is too cheap to deliver:
- A full app design under £3,000. At realistic UK rates that is a few days of work. You are buying templates.
- No discovery or requirements phase. The scope will move, and the price will move with it.
- A price given in under 24 hours with no questions asked. Nobody can scope an app they have not asked about.
- No named deliverables. “Full app design” is not a deliverable list.
- Vague ownership terms. If the contract does not say you own the design files, assume you do not.
- Change requests priced as “we’ll sort it later.” That is where the budget goes.
Cheap design is rarely cheap overall. It gets rebuilt, and you pay twice.
App design cost FAQ
Is app design cheaper than app development?
Yes, usually significantly. A £10,000–£30,000 design phase commonly pairs with a £15,000–£50,000 build, so development takes the larger share of most budgets. Design is also the cheapest place to change your mind — altering a screen costs hours, altering shipped code costs weeks. Skipping design does not remove those decisions, it just moves them to developers who charge more to make them.
Can I get an app designed for under £5,000?
Sometimes, but only for genuinely simple products — a handful of screens, one platform, standard patterns and no research. Below £3,000 you are generally buying template customisation rather than design. A more effective approach on a small budget is to reduce the app to its single most valuable feature and design that properly.
Do agencies charge for discovery?
Good ones do. Discovery produces requirements, scope and a written specification, and it is real work rather than a sales exercise — our own Blueprint phase is fixed at £12,000 and covers exactly that. Free discovery usually means either a sales call in disguise or a cost quietly absorbed into an inflated build price. Either way you pay for it.
How long does app design take?
Three to six weeks for a simple app, six to twelve weeks for a standard one, and twelve to twenty weeks or more for something complex. Timelines depend heavily on how quickly you give feedback. A project with a single decision-maker and weekly reviews moves roughly twice as fast as one waiting on committee sign-off.
What if I only need a redesign, not a new app?
Redesigns typically cost £6,000–£18,000, landing at the lower end when the existing structure is sound and only the interface needs modernising, and at the higher end when the underlying user flows need rethinking too. Redesigns often deliver the strongest return, because you already have real users and real data. Pretty Lavish saw engagement rise from 30% to 80% after a redesign of their experience. Our app redesign page covers how that work runs, and when a redesign is the wrong answer.
Do I own the design files?
You should, and the contract should say so explicitly before you sign it. Ask for the ownership clause in writing and check that it transfers the source files, not just exported images. Some suppliers retain ownership or licence the work back to you, which becomes an expensive problem the day you want to change agency or hand the files to a development team.
Getting an accurate price for your app
Digiruu is a London app UI/UX design agency based at 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, with 30+ verified reviews on Clutch. We publish our prices because vague pricing wastes everyone’s time: Blueprint at £12,000, Pro at £30,000, and Max from £75,000. Our work includes Amore Pizzeria’s food ordering app, which passed 50,000 orders and grew into a multi-million pound business. How the three stages fit together is set out on our app design agency in London page.
If you want a real number for your specific app rather than a range, start with Get Started and tell us what you are building. You can see how we approach app design on our Apps page.
If you would rather not commit to anything yet, start at no cost: our free UX audit is a review of your existing app or website and a written document of what we found and what we would recommend, with no fee and no obligation.