Ask five developers in Nigeria to quote "an app" and you'll receive numbers spanning two orders of magnitude, from ₦300,000 to ₦30 million, for what sounds, to you, like the same request.
Nobody's necessarily lying. They heard different apps. And until you can hear the difference too, you can't read a quote, you can only be impressed or frightened by one.
We wrote the website version of this article and it became one of our most-read pieces, so here's the same straight treatment for software: not one number, but the machine that produces the numbers, which is worth more, because it works on every quote you'll ever receive.
What "an app" actually contains
The word "app" is doing enormous, unpaid work in your request. Unpack it and the price range starts making sense:
Screens are the cheap part. What you can see, pages, buttons, forms, is the visible third of the iceberg. A quote that's mostly about screens is pricing a brochure, not a system.
Logic is the middle. What the app decides: who can see what, what happens on payment, how orders flow, what gets calculated. Every rule is real work, and every "oh, and it should also..." is a rule.
The invisible layer is where the money lives. User accounts and security. A database designed to survive growth. Payments (and their failure states, what happens when the debit succeeds but the confirmation doesn't?). Admin tools so you can run the thing. Notifications, backups, the behavior when the network drops mid-action. Clients never request this layer because it's invisible when it works, and cheap quotes are cheap precisely because they quietly omit it. The app still demos beautifully. It just can't survive contact with real customers, real money, and real Nigerian network conditions.
Platform multiplies everything. A web app (runs in the browser) is one build. Native iPhone + Android apps are closer to two or three builds wearing one name. Enormous amounts of money are wasted on native apps by businesses whose customers would have happily used a web app, the honest question is whether you need app-store presence and phone hardware access, or whether you've just been taught that "real" businesses have icons.
The rate math (so quotes stop being magic)
Software is priced in skilled time. Rough Nigerian market reality: junior developers, mid-level, senior engineers, and full agencies bill at very different rates, and international benchmarks like Upwork's published rate guides show the same spread globally. A "simple" system with accounts, payments, and admin tooling is realistically weeks to months of skilled time. Multiply honestly and you'll see why the credible quotes cluster where they do, from low millions of naira for a well-scoped web MVP, climbing with logic, platforms, and polish.
Which exposes the two dishonest ends: the ₦300k quote is pricing the visible third and either omitting the invisible layer, deferring it as future "additions," or paying rates that guarantee the work can't be done properly. The ₦30m quote for a simple tool is pricing their brand, their overhead, or your unfamiliarity. Neither number is a scandal. Both are readable, once you know what filling the word "app" costs.
How to compare quotes like someone who's done this before
- Demand the invisible layer in writing. Ask each quote to itemize: authentication, database design, payment failure handling, admin dashboard, backups, deployment. Watch what happens. The serious builders already had it itemized; the cheap ones will discover it and adjust upward, which is the comparison working.
- Ask what's NOT included. The most clarifying question in procurement. Honest answers sound like: "no native apps, no offline mode, integrations beyond Paystack are extra." A quote with nothing excluded has everything undefined.
- Ask the after-launch question. Hosting, maintenance, fixes, updates, who does it and at what cost? Software is never finished, only launched; a quote silent on year two is incomplete by exactly one year.
- Compare scopes before prices. Two quotes can only be compared once they describe the same app. Force them onto the same itemized scope first, the price gap that survives that is the real comparison.
The move that controls cost better than negotiating
Here's the honest secret: the businesses that spend well on software don't get cheaper rates, they buy less app, more correctly. Instead of the everything-version, they launch the smallest version that proves the idea with real users, then grow it with revenue and evidence. That approach has a name and a discipline, the MVP mindset, and it routinely turns a frightening quote into a fundable sequence.
Because the real cost question was never "how much is an app?" It's "how much is the first version that teaches us whether to build the rest?", and that number, honestly scoped, is almost always survivable.