How Much Does It Cost to Run an App? Monthly Hosting, Services and AI Bills

Building an app and running it are different budgets

Founders usually know what their app cost to build. Fewer know what it costs to keep it switched on. The running cost is everything you pay each month after launch so the app keeps working: servers, databases, the services it calls, and the fees stores and payment providers take. It grows with usage, which is good news when it tracks revenue and bad news when nobody is watching it.

This guide covers the monthly running bill. Paying engineers to update, patch and improve the app is a separate cost covered in our app maintenance cost guide; for most products it is a retainer of $1.5k to $8k per month.

Monthly running costs by stage

An MVP with a few thousand users typically costs $50 to $300 a month to run. A growing product with tens of thousands of users runs $300 to $2,000, and a busy product $2,000 or more, before staff costs.

These are planning figures from the products we build and support, excluding staff. A simple app with few integrations sits at the bottom of each band; apps with live location, video or heavy AI use can jump a band without gaining many users.

How much does app hosting cost per month?

• App hosting: managed platforms such as Vercel, Render or Railway, or AWS, Azure and Google Cloud directly. Managed platforms cost more per unit and save engineering time; most MVPs should start there.
• Database: a managed PostgreSQL or MongoDB plan is usually the largest fixed line at MVP stage. Backups and a staging copy add to it.
• Backend platforms: Supabase and Firebase bundle database, authentication, storage and functions. Supabase's paid plan starts at $25 a month plus compute and usage; Firebase bills by usage after a free tier.
• File storage and bandwidth: photos, video and documents cost little to store and more to serve. A CDN in front of them lowers both cost and load time.
• Monitoring: error tracking and uptime alerts have free tiers that cover most MVPs.

What do maps, SMS and other services cost?

How much do AI features cost to run?

If your app calls a language model, every request is billed by the number of tokens sent and returned. The cost is easy to estimate before launch: conversations per month, multiplied by tokens per conversation, multiplied by the model's price per token.

• Long system prompts and retrieved documents are resent on every turn; trimming them is the fastest saving.
• Route simple requests to a smaller model and keep the large one for hard questions.
• Use prompt caching where your provider offers it.
• Set per-user limits, so one heavy user or a bot cannot run up the bill.
• A vector database for retrieval adds a fixed monthly cost; small products can keep vectors in PostgreSQL instead.

Our AI chatbot development cost guide covers the build side of the same products.

What do app stores and payment providers charge?

• Apple Developer Program: $99 a year. Google Play developer registration: a one-time $25 fee.
• In-app purchases of digital goods and subscriptions: Apple and Google take a commission: 15 percent under their small business programmes and on most subscriptions (Apple after the first year, Google from the start), 30 percent otherwise. Physical goods and real-world services use your own payment provider instead.
• Store rules are changing: since 2025, court rulings in the US and the EU's Digital Markets Act let some apps link to their own payment pages or use alternative billing, at different commission rates. Check each store's current terms before you price subscriptions.
• Card payments: a percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction. Stripe's standard US price is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for online cards.
• Marketplace payouts, currency conversion and international cards add further fees.

5. People: the cost that is not on the cloud bill

An app that nobody maintains stops working. Apple and Google raise their requirements every year, dependencies publish security fixes, and users find bugs. Budget for maintenance from day one: 15 to 20 percent of the build cost a year, or a monthly retainer of $1.5k to $8k per month. Support staff, moderation and content are business costs on top.

How to lower the running cost

1. Set billing alerts on every cloud and service account on the first day.
2. Tag resources by environment and feature so you can see what each part of the app costs.
3. Delete unused staging environments, old snapshots and orphaned storage.
4. Cache map, search and AI responses that many users request.
5. Move background work to scheduled jobs that scale to zero when idle.
6. Review the bill monthly against active users, and investigate any line that grows faster than usage.
7. Commit to reserved capacity or savings plans only once usage is stable.

We run a cost review as part of every software maintenance and support retainer, and our cloud and DevOps team takes on infrastructure that has grown expensive. To estimate the build itself, use the app development cost calculator.

Sources

• Apple Developer Program membership: https://developer.apple.com/programs/whats-included/
• Google Play Console registration: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6112435
• Apple App Store Small Business Program: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/
• Stripe pricing: https://stripe.com/pricing
• Supabase pricing: https://supabase.com/pricing
• Google Maps Platform pricing: https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/