What does a club app actually cost to build?

15 September 2026 · 9 min read

Almost every committee that asks this question has already had a number thrown at them, and it was either alarming or suspiciously cheap. Both are usually answers to a question the club has not actually asked yet — because "an app" turns out to mean three different things, and only one of them is expensive. Here is what clubs tell us goes wrong, and what each of those things really costs.

"We got a quote for more than our annual budget"

The quote is usually honest. A custom build genuinely is that much work — design, iOS, Android, a back end, testing, store submission — and the agency is not inflating it. The problem is that most clubs asking for a quote have described an app when what they needed was a way to reach their members, and those are very different purchases.

Before you go any further, it is worth separating the three things people mean by "an app", because they do not cost within an order of magnitude of each other. Your own listing in the App Store and on Google Play under your club’s name. A web page members save to their home screen. Or a space inside a platform’s app that is already published, which members install and find you in.

Most committees are picturing the first and would be perfectly served by the third. Nearly all the money is in the gap between them, and nobody asks which one you need before quoting.

We are not going to put a figure on a custom build here, because every number available is published by somebody who sells custom builds and we cannot source it the way we have sourced everything else. What we can tell you is the part of the quote nobody itemises — which is the next two problems.

"We paid for an app once, and now nobody maintains it"

This is the most common regret we hear, and it is nobody’s fault. The club commissioned a build, it worked, the developer moved on, and eighteen months later it stopped working properly on new phones. Apple and Google ship changes every year that eventually require a rebuild and a resubmission, so an app is not a thing you buy — it is a thing you keep.

There is a floor under all of it that no vendor controls. Google Play’s developer documentation states there is a "US$25 one-time registration fee", and Apple publishes a "$99 annual membership". The Apple one is the one that matters: it recurs for as long as you want the app to stay listed, whether the app is brilliant, broken, or opened by nobody.

The build is a one-off. The listing is a subscription you never stop paying.

So the question worth asking any quote is not what launch costs. It is what year three costs — who is on retainer, what happens when iOS changes, and whether the person who wrote it will still answer the phone. Finding someone new to read somebody else’s code is more expensive than keeping the original author, which is a sentence worth putting in front of a treasurer before anyone signs.

"The app is in a volunteer’s name and he has left the club"

This sounds like paperwork and it is the single most consequential decision on this page. Somebody has to hold the Apple account, and in most clubs that ends up being whoever set it up — on their Apple ID, their card, their email address. They now effectively own your club’s app, and when they move interstate or simply get tired, nobody else can update it.

There is a structural reason it happens. Apple offers a fee waiver that removes the $99 entirely for nonprofits, accredited educational institutions and government entities, but the conditions published on 17 September 2026 require the organisation to be a legal entity rather than an individual or sole trader, recognised as such by the relevant authority, not signed up for paid apps or in-app purchases, and not selling digital goods or services through any of its apps.

Read that first condition again, because it decides something else too. An unincorporated club is not a legal entity, so it cannot hold the account — which is exactly how the account ends up in a person’s name.

The same applies to the domain, the Google Play account and the email address the password resets go to. None of it appears in a quote, and all of it is what actually breaks. If you take one thing from this page: write down whose name the account will be in before you open it, not after.

"We are paying every year for an app nobody opens"

Worth saying plainly: if your club is thirty people and one team, you do not need an app and you should not buy one. A group chat and a shared calendar cost nothing and nobody is going to install something to find out that training is on. Spond, for instance, describes itself on its own site as a free sports team management app, and for a single team that needs a schedule and a chat it is hard to argue against.

The honest test is not club size but whether information is failing to reach people who needed it. If it is not, an app is a solution looking for a problem and it will quietly become one more thing a volunteer maintains.

The route most cost guides leave out

Every comparison above assumes you need your own icon in the stores. Question that before you pay for it, because dropping it removes the Apple account, the $99 a year, the annual resubmission and the review rejections all at once.

Shared-host platforms give your club a space inside an app that is already published. Members install that app and find you in it. That is what Able2 is: free to start, then US$10, US$39 and US$99 a month, with unlimited members on every tier — so a club that doubles does not pay double — and the features arrive finished rather than commissioned. The sixty-month sum is just the subscription, because there is no store account in your name to renew.

The honest cost of this route is the icon. Your club does not appear in the store under its own name; members download the platform’s app and find you inside it. If a branded icon is a real requirement — a grant that specifies it, a naming-rights sponsor expecting it — this does not meet it on day one.

It is a timeline rather than a dead end, though. You can move to your own white-label listing later; on Able2 that is Pro+, an add-on subscription on top of the Pro tier arranged with us rather than bought off the pricing page. The build is then published to your club’s own Apple and Google accounts — at which point every fee on this page becomes yours again, and our add-on sits on top of those rather than replacing them. Apple’s organisation enrolment also needs a D-U-N-S Number, a legal entity, a work email on your own domain and a working website on it; in our experience that paperwork and store review together run about two to four weeks, so start it early rather than late.

Deciding in twenty minutes

1. 01

   Write down what breaks without it

   Not what an app would be nice for — what is actively going wrong now. If you cannot fill three lines, you have your answer and it is free. If all three lines are "people did not see the message", you need reach, which is the cheapest thing on this page to buy.

2. 02

   Decide whether the icon is a requirement or a preference

   Ask who specifically needs your club to have its own store listing, and what happens if it does not. If the honest answer is "it would look more professional", that preference costs $99 a year forever plus a build or a subscription. Price it, then decide — do not decide and then price it.

3. 03

   Multiply every subscription by sixty

   Five years is the realistic life of a club’s decision, and monthly pricing is designed not to be read that way. Do the sum for each option and put it next to any build quote. The ranking frequently reverses.

4. 04

   Name the account holder before you open the account

   Write down whose name it will be in and what happens when that person leaves. If your club is incorporated, use the club. If it is not, either incorporate or reconsider step 02 — this is the failure mode that ends club apps, not cost.

When we are not the right answer

A club that signs up for the wrong reason helps nobody, so these are the cases where we would rather you did not.

• You need your club’s own icon in the store on day one. A grant or a sponsor that specifies it is a real requirement and we do not meet it immediately. Pro+ gets you there later, but not by next Tuesday.
• You have a genuinely unusual requirement. Timing equipment, a regulator to satisfy, software that must work with no signal, a membership structure nobody has modelled. You are buying the absence of a ceiling, and that is what a custom build is for.
• Your problem is the books and the minutes. Reconciliation, accounting sync, agendas, statutory registers — a governance platform does that job and we do not. We help money get collected into your own Stripe account; we do not balance it.
• You want control over every element and layout. We are a set of finished, deeply configurable parts and a finite number of them. If pixel-level control over everything is the requirement, commission it.
• You are one team of thirty in a single group chat. Nothing is falling through. Do not buy anything.