This is part of our series on how AI has changed IT jobs and project pricing in 2026. Deciding between a progressive web app and a native app is one of the more consequential pricing decisions in this series, because the gap is not small and it compounds every year the app stays in use.
What Each Option Actually Costs
A progressive web app, or PWA, typically costs 25,000 to 80,000 dollars depending on feature complexity, offline capability requirements, and how deeply it needs to integrate with a backend. A native build for both iOS and Android instead runs 80,000 to 200,000 dollars or more over six to nine months. A PWA is typically 30 to 50 percent cheaper to build than an equivalent single native app, and 60 to 70 percent cheaper than building separate iOS and Android apps plus a standard website, which is the more realistic comparison for most businesses actually weighing this decision.
The Timeline Difference
A PWA ships in four to eight weeks. Native development for both iOS and Android takes six to nine months. That is not a marginal difference, it is the gap between launching before a quarter ends and launching sometime next year.
The Maintenance Gap That Keeps Growing
A mid-complexity business app built natively for both platforms costs 80,000 to 150,000 dollars upfront and 15,000 to 30,000 dollars a year to maintain afterward. The same app built as a PWA costs 40,000 to 80,000 dollars upfront, with maintenance dropping to 8,000 to 15,000 dollars a year, a gap that keeps compounding every year the app stays in active use, since a single PWA codebase avoids the duplicated maintenance work of keeping two separate native codebases in sync.
When Native Still Genuinely Wins
For most ordinary business use cases, a PWA delivers roughly 90 percent of the native experience at a fraction of the cost and development time. The remaining 10 percent, deep integration with device-specific hardware features, certain performance-critical graphics work, or app store discovery and presence, is where native still has a real, legitimate advantage, and it is worth paying for specifically when the product genuinely depends on that remaining 10 percent rather than defaulting to native out of habit.
Why We Wrote This
This is part of our ongoing series on how AI has changed IT jobs and project pricing, following our breakdown of custom ERP system costs and building on why dev costs dropped 70 to 90 percent for simple projects. Learn more on our Brand Guidelines page, or read about what Wolvra stands for on our About Us page. Want us to cover a specific project type next? Reach us through Contact Us.