How to Tell If Your App Development Quote Is Fair

You just got a quote for your app build, and you have no idea if the number is fair. I hear this from founders a lot, and my advice is usually the same: before you compare prices, ask each vendor how their developers use AI.

Everyone will say yes if you ask whether they use it, so that version of the question is useless. What you’re listening for is specifics. A team that has done the work will tell you which tools are in their editors (Claude, Copilot, Cursor), whether AI is writing tests alongside every feature, and how their code review changed because of it. If the answer is a vague sentence about innovation followed by a pivot to the demo, that tells you something too.

The reason this matters is that AI changed what a small team can produce, and pricing hasn’t caught up evenly across the industry. I built and shipped a fully monetized SaaS by myself in six months, including the infrastructure, the payments, and the deployment pipeline. Not long ago I would have needed a team for that scope, and every agency quoting you knows it.

To be clear, I’m not telling you to take the cheapest bid. I’ve watched founders pay twice for a cheap build. But a vendor who can’t describe how their own process has changed since 2023 is probably billing you as if nothing has.

Founders, what’s the vaguest answer a vendor has ever given you when you asked how they work?