Here’s the money answer before you sit through a sales call. Building the same cross-platform app, React Native runs about $25K to $70K for an MVP while Flutter runs $30K to $80K. React Native is 15 to 25 percent cheaper up front, mostly because its developers bill less. Flutter can pull ahead over three years on lower maintenance. That’s the whole decision in three sentences, and if you want it priced against your actual feature list, reach out and we’ll scope it.
We’re gmware, a software development firm headquartered in Austin, TX with engineering centers in Bangalore and Mohali, India. We build mobile apps in both stacks, so we don’t have a horse in this race. This post gives you the per-stack cost bands, the hourly rates that drive them, the three-year math, and an honest read on when to skip both and go native.
React Native vs Flutter at a glance
React Native vs Flutter: the cost comparison table
Here’s the side-by-side, built from the same complexity buckets, so you’re comparing an MVP to an MVP and not one vendor’s marketing to another’s.
| Complexity | React Native | Flutter | RN advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| MVP (8 to 12 screens) | $25K to $70K | $30K to $80K | 15 to 25% cheaper |
| Mid-complexity (15 to 20 screens) | $35K to $130K | $40K to $150K | 15 to 25% cheaper |
| Complex (30+ screens) | $70K to $220K+ | $80K to $250K+ | 15 to 25% cheaper |
| Annual maintenance | $8K to $28K | $5K to $18K | Flutter cheaper |
Read that last row twice. React Native wins every build-cost row and loses the maintenance one. That single flip is the whole three-year argument, and we’ll do the arithmetic below.
Why React Native comes in cheaper up front
It’s the rates. React Native runs on JavaScript, which roughly 67 percent of developers use, so the hiring pool is huge and competitive. Flutter runs on Dart, sitting near 6 percent adoption. Fewer people know it, so they charge more. The premium shows up at every level.
Hourly rates: React Native vs Flutter
There’s a second, quieter reason RN often lands cheaper in practice: if you already have a web team writing React, they can read and touch a React Native codebase. That shared skill set cuts onboarding time and lets a smaller team cover more surface. Flutter gives you nothing there unless someone already knows Dart, and few do.
When does Flutter actually cost less?
Over a long enough horizon. Flutter renders its own widgets instead of bridging to native components, which sidesteps a class of platform-specific bugs and version-skew headaches. That’s why its annual maintenance runs $5K to $18K against React Native’s $8K to $28K. Stretch that over three years and the total cost of ownership can land Flutter 10 to 20 percent cheaper, even after the higher build.
Here’s the worked math on a mid-complexity app. We’ll take the midpoints and run three years.
| Line | React Native | Flutter |
|---|---|---|
| Build (mid-complexity midpoint) | ~$82K | ~$95K |
| Maintenance, 3 years (midpoint × 3) | ~$54K | ~$34K |
| 3-year total | ~$136K | ~$129K |
3-year total cost, mid-complexity app
That gap is thin. It’s real, but it’s thin, and it assumes your app churns enough for maintenance to matter. A brochure-style app that barely changes never gets to cash in Flutter’s advantage. A product that ships every sprint does. Be honest about which one you’re building before you let a three-year TCO chart pick your stack.
Our opinion, since the spec asks for one: for most first apps, we’d start React Native. The bigger talent pool means it’s easier to hire for, easier to hand off, and easier to rescue if the first vendor flakes. Flutter earns its premium when the design demands identical rendering on every device down to the pixel, or when the app’s whole reason to exist is a rich custom UI.
The cost drivers neither framework changes
Framework choice moves the number 15 to 25 percent. Scope moves it several hundred percent. The things that actually blow up a mobile budget don’t care whether you picked Dart or JavaScript:
- Backend and API work. The app is a window. The engine behind it, auth, payments, real-time sync, is where the hours go.
- Integrations. Every third-party system you plug into (payment processor, CRM, mapping, push) is real engineering, not a checkbox.
- Compliance. A healthcare app runs $50K to $200K+ and a fintech app $70K to $250K+, not because of the framework but because of encryption, audit logging, and regulatory design.
- Design polish. A wireframe-grade UI is cheap. A designed one, with motion and states that feel considered, is not.
If you want the framework-agnostic version of this, we broke down the full range in our mobile app development cost guide. This post is the stack-decision cut of that.
Where you build changes the price more than what you build in
A quick reality check on those rates. A US React Native developer bills $100 to $180 an hour; a South Asia one bills $25 to $50. That’s a bigger swing than the entire Flutter premium. Which is the honest reason a lot of the framework debate is beside the point: your delivery model sets your cost floor before your stack does.
We run that math openly. Senior engineers in Bangalore and Mohali, architecture and accountability in Austin, on hours that overlap yours. It’s the same structure we describe in our dedicated development team writeup, and it’s why our mid-tier quotes tend to land under US-only shops without the cheapest-offshore quality cliff.
How gmware scopes a cross-platform build
We start by asking what the app has to do, not which framework you’ve already fallen in love with. A short scoping pass (feature list, integration inventory, compliance check, design ambition) tells us whether React Native or Flutter fits, and occasionally tells you native is the right call and cross-platform would fight you.
When cross-platform is right, delivery runs through our product development practice: one codebase, both stores, senior engineers on your timezone overlap. We’ll price it against your real feature list, not a generic table.
Tell us what you’re trying to ship and to which platforms. Reach out and we’ll give you a straight answer on stack, cost, and timeline within 48 hours.