What It Really Costs to Turn a Magento Store into a Mobile App (2025 Breakdown)

Building a custom native ecommerce app generally requires an investment of $50,000 to $100,000 or more for the initial release.

Even cross-platform approaches like React Native or Flutter tend to land in the mid–five-figure to low–six-figure range once integrations, testing, and refinement are factored in.

But at the same time, native apps are usually one of the highest-ROI channels you can invest in. Independent benchmarks regularly show ecommerce brands getting significantly higher conversion rates and revenue per user in apps compared to mobile web.

Once you’re on the customer’s home screen, you unlock retention levers like push notifications and one-tap re-entry that can dramatically increase how often people come back and buy.

So the real question isn’t “can we build an app?” It’s: “What’s the smartest way to get a high-quality Magento app without lighting $50k+ on fire?”

In this guide, we’ll break down what it actually costs to turn a Magento site into an app in 2025.

Option 1: Custom Native App Development

This is the route most people think of first. You hire a specialized mobile app agency to build two separate native apps from scratch, one for iOS (Swift) and one for Android (Kotlin).

It’s the “Nike approach.” You get a completely bespoke product, but you pay a premium price for it.

The Upfront Cost: $50,000–$200,000+

Building a custom native app for a Magento store is a major software project. You’re not just designing a new UI, you’re building and maintaining an additional frontend that needs to talk cleanly to your Magento backend via APIs.

If you browse app pricing data in places like Clutch’s Mobile App Development Pricing Guide, you’ll see most professionally built apps falling into the tens of thousands of dollars, with an average project cost around $90k and timelines close to a year.

GoodFirms’ dedicated analysis of ecommerce mobile app development cost shows native ecommerce apps frequently falling in the $50,000–$200,000+ range, with cross-platform builds somewhat cheaper but still firmly in five figures once you add in real-world features.

For a bare-bones custom app, you might scrape by closer to $50k. For a polished, feature-rich ecommerce experience with parity to your Magento site, $75k–$200k+ is very common, and firmly in line with ecommerce-focused estimates from GoodFirms and other app cost guides.

CTA: Dig deeper into how this compares with broader ecommerce app costs, we break that down in more detail in our guide on the cost to build an ecommerce app.

The Timeline: 6–12 Months

Custom development is thorough, but it’s slow.

Serious ecommerce builds commonly take 6–12 months, and often close to a year when you factor in revisions and store approvals.

In ecommerce, that’s a long time to wait before you can prove ROI or start sending push notifications.

Maintenance (The “Silent Killer”)

The launch bill is only the beginning. To keep a custom app healthy, you need to budget for ongoing maintenance:

• OS updates: New versions of iOS and Android every year.
  
• Device changes: New devices, screen sizes, and hardware quirks.
  
• Magento updates: Changes to your store’s theme, checkout flow, or extensions that need to be reflected in the app.
  
• New features: Any new payment methods, loyalty programs, bundles, or merchandising logic you add to your site must be rebuilt for the apps.

Most app maintenance guides recommend budgeting around 15–20% of your initial development cost per year just for maintenance and updates.

If you spend $80k to build, that’s roughly $12k–$16k/year just to keep things running.

Option 2: DIY App Builders

DIY Magento app builders promise to turn your store into a mobile app in a fraction of the time of a custom build. You usually get a dashboard, some templates, and a promise that “no code” is required to launch on iOS and Android.

Subscription Costs: $100–$600+/month

Pure DIY Magento 2 app builders often sell one-time licenses in the low–mid hundreds of dollars.

Bare-bones tools can start around $29 as a one-off purchase, while more complete native app builders typically sit in the $299–$999 range, especially when they include app store submission help and 12 months of updates.

For serious mid-market brands, the real spend is usually in the monthly plans.

Most Magento app builders and app-as-a-service platforms aimed at growing stores fall into the low- to mid-three figures per month, and some more managed tiers creep toward $1,000+/month once you factor in higher order volumes, premium support, or extra features.

CTA: If you want a detailed rundown of specific options and pricing, take a look at our guide to the best Magento mobile app builders.

The Cost You Don’t See

The real cost of DIY builders is rarely the subscription itself. It’s the combination of limitations and the time your team has to spend wrestling with them.

1. The “Cookie-Cutter” Look

DIY builders rely heavily on templates and pre-built blocks. That means:

• You’re constrained to their layouts and navigation patterns.
  
  
• It’s hard or impossible to fully mirror your Magento theme.
  
  
• Your app will look and feel similar to hundreds of others.

For brands that have invested significantly in custom design, this jump to a generic template can feel like a downgrade.

2. Incomplete Support for Extensions & Customizations

Most serious Magento stores rely on essential extensions.

Reviews from tools like Yotpo or Judge.me play a crucial role. Loyalty platforms such as Smile.io or LoyaltyLion help keep customers engaged.

Powerful search engines like Klevu or Algolia ensure shoppers find what they need. Add in bundles, upsells, custom promotions, and specialized checkout flows, and you have the features that make the experience truly work.

DIY builders, on the other hand, depend on basic Magento APIs that rarely expose the full behavior of these extensions. They offer only limited or partial integrations with the tools you already use, and often break down when custom logic or edge cases come into play.

The result is a watered-down version of your store, missing the very features that drive revenue and loyalty on the web.

3. You Own the Project (and the Risk)

Because these tools are self-service, you end up handling the app configuration, content, and troubleshooting yourself.

You also become responsible for dealing with App Store and Play Store rejections. When a Magento or OS update breaks something, you’re stuck waiting on the builder’s team for a fix.

What starts as a cheap subscription often turns into a major time sink for your team, with a mediocre app as the final result.

Option 3: MobiLoud

So, is there a middle ground? A way to get a high-quality, native app experience without a six-figure build and ongoing maintenance headaches?

That’s where MobiLoud comes in.

MobiLoud is a website-to-app platform built specifically for brands that already have a strong mobile site.

Instead of rebuilding your store from scratch, we use your existing Magento site as the foundation and turn it into a native app. It’s that simple.

The Cost: Setup + Subscription

MobiLoud is designed to be accessible for serious mid-market ecommerce brands.

We offer a one-time setup of $1,500, which covers the full build, configuration, design adjustments, and submission to both the App Store and Google Play.

From there, ongoing plans start at $549 per month, including maintenance, updates, hosting, and unlimited push notifications, without revenue share or hidden costs.

Over the lifecycle of your app, this model saves tens of thousands compared to building and maintaining a bespoke app from scratch.

Instead of paying a dev agency to reinvent your store (and risk throwing away years of hard-won website optimizations), you get a fully managed platform that turns what already works into a mobile app and keeps your app and website working seamlessly together.

Why MobiLoud?

1. No Rebuilding: You Keep Your Magento Frontend

Because MobiLoud uses your existing mobile site, your theme, layout, and branding carry over seamlessly. Your checkout flow and any custom logic remain intact, and if an extension or integration works on your mobile website, it will work in the app as well.

You don’t pay twice for the same work. When you update your website, those changes flow through to the apps automatically, without requiring another development project.

2. Fast Time-to-Market (~4 Weeks)

We typically launch Magento apps in about four weeks, end to end. You connect your site, we configure and style the app, and you review it on real devices.

From there, we handle the full submission process with Apple and Google. While a custom app is still stuck in discovery and design, you’re already live in the stores and sending push campaigns.

If you want to see how this model stacks up against other Magento app solutions, check out our detailed comparison with other Magento app builders.

Luxury fashion brand Tadashi Shoji is a good example. With a lean dev team on Magento, they skipped a long native build and used MobiLoud to turn their existing mobile site into a fully native app in about four weeks.

The app now drives around 18% of total online revenue (about 30% of mobile revenue) and generates roughly 10x more revenue per user than their mobile website. And they kept full design control with virtually zero ongoing native app maintenance for their team.

Summary Comparison Table

Here’s how the three main options compare side by side:

Final thoughts

For a long time, Magento merchants have faced an uncomfortable choice: spend six figures on a custom native app that takes most of a year to ship or you could settle for a generic template app.

That trade-off just doesn’t make sense anymore. If you’re a serious brand focused on retention, repeat purchases, and lifetime value, you don’t need to rebuild everything from scratch.

You need a high-quality mobile experience that lives on your customers’ home screens and doesn’t saddle you with a second product roadmap and dev team.

That’s exactly what MobiLoud is for.

We give you the presence and retention power of a native app, the speed and affordability of a website-to-app platform, and the support and reliability of a fully managed service.

Instead of gambling $50k–$100k+ on a risky custom build, you can launch a better-aligned app in about a month for a fraction of the cost, fully tailored to your brand and optimized for growth.

Ready to see what your Magento site looks like as an app? Get a free live app preview today.