If you are pricing a mobile app for your online store, the published answer is somewhere between US$150 and US$2,850 a month, before any usage-based charges — and that is the figure most people stop at. The more useful number is what that monthly fee adds up to over the life of the app, and what makes it rise.
Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page or its own Shopify App Store listing, checked on 26 September 2026, in US dollars as published. Prices change; check them again before you sign anything.
The published prices
| Vendor | Plan | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Superfans | Starter | $150/month (Shopify App Store listing) |
| AppBrew | Starter | $199/month |
| Tapcart | Growth | $500/month |
| AppBrew | Pro | $599/month |
| Superfans | Unlimited | $1,000/month; $10,000/year on its Shopify App Store listing |
| AppBrew | Enterprise | $1,099/month (Shopify App Store listing) |
| Tapcart | Scale | $1,250/month |
| MobiLoud | Business | $1,499/month, or $1,274/month billed annually, plus a one-time development and submission fee |
| Tapcart | Enterprise+ | $2,850/month |
Two things are missing from that table because the vendors do not publish them. MobiLoud states a one-time development and submission fee but not its amount. Tapcart sells an AI add-on at $250 a month on every plan, which is optional and not included above.
Five years is the number that matters
A mobile app is not a campaign. Once customers have it on their home screens, it stays there, and so does the bill. Multiplying the monthly fee by sixty months gives a more honest picture of what you are committing to:
| Plan | Five-year total |
|---|---|
| Superfans Starter | $9,000 |
| AppBrew Starter | $11,940 |
| Tapcart Growth | $30,000 |
| AppBrew Pro | $35,940 |
| Superfans Unlimited | $60,000 monthly, or $50,000 on annual billing |
| AppBrew Enterprise | $65,940 |
| Tapcart Scale | $75,000 |
| MobiLoud Business | $76,440 annual billing, $89,940 monthly — plus the setup fee |
| Tapcart Enterprise+ | $171,000 |
Add Tapcart’s AI add-on to the Growth plan and the five-year figure rises from $30,000 to $45,000.
This assumes prices stay where they are for five years, which is optimistic. It is worth noting that Superfans publishes a Price Lock Guarantee, which is exactly the kind of term that matters on a sixty-month view. Ask every vendor whether they offer one.
The line that moves: usage
The monthly fee is the floor, not the price. Some of these vendors tie cost to how much the app is used — which means the bill rises precisely when the app starts working.
MobiLoud is the clearest example because it publishes the arithmetic. Its Business plan includes up to 10,000 monthly active users; above that, it charges $50 for each additional 1,000. On monthly billing, that looks like this:
| Monthly active users | Monthly bill | Five-year total |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $1,499 | $89,940 |
| 25,000 | $2,249 | $134,940 |
| 50,000 | $3,499 | $209,940 |
| 100,000 | $5,999 | $359,940 |
To be fair to MobiLoud, publishing this is more transparent than most. It also states plainly that there is no revenue share on any plan, at any volume.
AppBrew’s Shopify App Store listing describes its Starter and Pro plans as carrying “additional charges based on app performance”, without saying how they are calculated. If you are considering AppBrew, ask for that formula in writing before you commit.
The pattern is not a criticism of any one vendor. It is how software-as-a-service is priced. The point is to model your bill at the usage you are hoping for, not the usage you have today.
Your platform decides the shortlist before price does
Before comparing prices, check whether the vendor supports the platform your store runs on.
Tapcart states it directly: “At this time, Tapcart is only able to support businesses that run ecommerce operations on Shopify.” AppBrew and Superfans both position themselves around Shopify stores. MobiLoud lists Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, WordPress, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and PrestaShop.
If you run Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce or a custom stack, most of the table above is not available to you, and the comparison is shorter than it looks.
What the subscription actually buys
It would be misleading to present a subscription as pure cost. A monthly fee usually pays for real, ongoing work: hosting, the app builder itself, push notifications, analytics, support, and — most importantly — keeping the app working as Apple and Google change iOS and Android every year. That last item is not optional. An app that is not maintained eventually breaks.
Some costs apply to every native app regardless of who builds it. Publishing requires an Apple Developer account at $99 a year and a Google Play developer account at a one-time $25, as both Tapcart and AppBrew note on their pricing pages. Over five years, that is $520 whichever route you take.
So the fair comparison is not “subscription versus nothing”. It is subscription versus a build plus whatever year two, three and four cost to maintain.
Five questions to ask before you sign
- What is the five-year total at the number of users I expect in year three? Not today’s number.
- Is any part of the price tied to usage, orders or performance? If yes, get the formula in writing.
- Does it support my platform, or would I have to migrate my store to use it?
- What happens to the app if I stop paying? Ask directly, and get the answer in the contract.
- Who pays for the updates when Apple and Google change their operating systems? For a subscription, this is usually included. For a build, it is the question that decides the real cost.
The last question applies to every option, including a one-time build. Any vendor who cannot answer it clearly has not told you the full price.
TAPQUAD builds native iOS and Android apps from the website you already run, on Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce or a custom stack, in about two weeks. The build is a fixed price agreed before work starts, with no per-user charge. Once the app is live, a maintenance contract keeps it current with the mandatory changes Apple and Google make — priced on the app’s complexity and the store rules it has to meet, not on how many people use it. Whether that beats a subscription depends on your platform, your users and your answer to question five, which is why we quote it rather than publish a number.
Prices are each vendor’s own, as published on 26 September 2026. Links: Tapcart pricing · MobiLoud pricing · AppBrew pricing · AppBrew on the Shopify App Store · Superfans pricing · Superfans on the Shopify App Store